People Trapped by Their Decisions

This is an eye-opening take on a heartbreaking situation. The woman being interviewed in this video is fighting against the incursion of biological men in women’s spaces. She describes the people who are fighting against her have motivations they are not being honest about. While not public knowledge, they have transitioned their children, so they have to fight for “trans rights” until the day they die. She says she has become a “standing reproach” to these people, and likens them to the Japanese soldiers in WWII who would never surrender after the war was over. They are forever compelled to attack her, because to agree that she makes a good point — any point — would mean they were wrong, and lest they have to face the fact that they have done irreparable damage to the very ones they had responsibility to protect from such abuse.

I’m not here to get into any of that argument. I simply realized it has a wider application.

This was my last post to Facebook, before I deleted my account.

I can’t get into details… at least not yet… but imagine, for a second, the length, breadth, and depth of the betrayal that would lead someone to make such a post. That might be captured by the image of being stabbed in the back, face, and heart. Got it? OK.

Now imagine the “support” system that has to be in place for someone to have implemented such a betrayal, not just of a person or a family, but an entire mid-sized church. The friends and family that had to have colluded. Got it? OK.

The people who played a part in committing this betrayal are still going around telling people that they were falsely accused, that there’s “another side” to the story, lying about that “side,” and blaming the entire problem on others (including me, I’m sure), despite the fact that scores of us who know the details about what happened are crystal clear about it. We have the figurative and literal receipts proving “our” side. I helped dig them up. Over the past couple of years, I’ve often agonized over the question, “How can they be like this?”

That’s where the video comes in. When I watched it, it was an aha! moment. I finally realized that the people who worked to enable this giant betrayal, this… gargantuan rug-pull, this… 40-year-long con will never — can never — admit to any wrongdoing or their part in it. The soul-crushing disappointment of facing the reality of being such a narcissistic sociopath would be too much. So they are going to go to their grave sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling, ignoring the plain facts of the situation, and avoiding their own consciousnesses over their multiple, decades-long moral and ethical failings

They have to live in a headspace where they say things like I’m “misinformed,” because if I’m not, it has soul-crushing implications. They’ll live the rest of their lives in an ivory tower of their own imaginations, locked away from the generational spiritual and emotional harm they’ve inflicted on hundreds of people, including some of their closest, so-called friends, because to admit they’ve committed such grievous injury would be impossible to reconcile with their their supposed beliefs and ethos, and their carefully-curated public image.

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A Tale of Two Games

Population of Fallout 76 (green) vs. Elder Scrolls Online (blue)

Last year, Microsoft slashed ZeniMax Online Studios to the bone, cutting an unreleased game that had been taking 7 years in development, and firing half the studio that was working on it. Although not fired, per se, the studio lead left right after. These moves apparently lit a fire under the butts of the people who remained. The Elder Scrolls Online announced and is releasing an overwhelming slate of new content and quality-of-life upgrades through the next couple of years, and the game’s population count is now starting to rebound. I think this trend will continue.

I’ve quit ESO. I’ve looked at several other games to replace it. Battlefield 6 was good and interesting, but the skill range is too high, and the sweats have run off all the casuals. I tried Warframe, which has a nice player count these days, but there’s no multiplayer end game to speak of. I tried Destiny 2, but even fans say it’s nigh impossible to get into as a new player, now that they deleted the first half of the content. Between the inscrutability of the systems, player counts being in the toilet, and Bungie in serious trouble after the release of Marathon, I’m giving this a miss pending better fortunes. I hate any game that’s all or nothing, which eliminates extraction shooters, like Arc Raiders, from consideration. Diablo IV and Path of Exile are too dark for my tastes. WoW is too cartoonish. Final Fantasy XIV is too furry. Guild Wars 2 looks interesting, but it’s PC only, and I just want to game on my console in my recliner. And that’s about it for MMO’s that I might be interested in.

So all of this continues to leave me with Fallout 76. Meanwhile, Bethesda Game Studios adds less content and more bugs with every release of Fallout 76. It’s in a bad place right now, and the player counts definitely reflect this. Bethesda fumbled the latest re-release of Fallout 4, which is still plagued with bugs, after many months. They fumbled Starfield’s original release, and now continue to fumble with Starfield for Playstation, which is also reportedly full of bugs. It seems they’re never going to get to The Elder Scrolls VI. I sure wish Microsoft would kick their rear ends in gear somehow. Given popular sentiment on the subreddit, I think the current trend with player counts in 76 will also continue unless something changes drastically. Their recent announcement about the next big patch clearly continues the decline.

Bethesda, please, make Fallout 76 great again. I find it almost inconceivable that I can’t find any games I want to play besides this one right now.

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    systemd birthDate Merge: Corporate Filings & Governance Failure – TBOTE Project

    Investigation into Amutable GmbH founding documents, undisclosed conflicts in the systemd birthDate merge, EUR 855K in undisclosed government funding, and $42.2M in corporate lobbying.

    Source: systemd birthDate Merge: Corporate Filings & Governance Failure – TBOTE Project

    The executive summary:

    On March 18, 2026, a first-time contributor submitted a pull request adding a birthDate field to systemd’s user record schema. A Microsoft employee merged it against 37 thumbs-down and 1 thumbs-up. The community submitted a revert. Lennart Poettering – who had incorporated a commercial Linux startup called Amutable seven months earlier – closed the revert without merging and locked the discussion. The entire sequence took 48 hours.

    This investigation pulled Amutable’s founding documents from the German Handelsregister. The corporate filings show three equal shareholders, no outside investors, and self-dealing exemptions that let any founder sign contracts between the company and their own personal entities. All three founders were employed at Microsoft when they signed the founding deed. A hidden shareholders’ agreement – referenced three times in the Articles of Association but never filed publicly – governs economic rights, IP assignment, and vesting terms the public cannot see.

    Three decisions put the birthDate field into systemd. Each was made by someone with a direct financial interest in the outcome. No one disclosed those interests. systemd has no conflict-of-interest policy, no steering committee, no community veto, and no disclosure requirements. The project that boots every major Linux distribution has less formal governance than a typical mid-size open source project.

    Amazing. Astounding, even. So good, old Lennart Pottering is a bad guy. Who knew? Was he always?

    From his Wikipedia page:

    Poettering was born in Guatemala City but grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Hamburg, Germany. Poettering worked for Red Hat from 2008 to 2022. He then joined Microsoft. In 2026, Poettering left Microsoft to cofound Amutable, a company focused on integrity verification for Linux systems.

    What happened during his 4 years at Microsoft to make him leave and make this his whole identity?

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    The Love/Hate for ESO Turns Once Again

    I’ve written extensively about ESO. I started during COVID with some IRL friends, took a break, came back for Oakensoul and Arcanist, took another long break, recently came back for subclassing, and now I think I’m well and truly done.

    It’s the combat. I just can’t get away from the fact that I don’t like it. I’m not great at it. Passable, not great. But here’s the revelation: I don’t think I’d enjoy the game even if I was good at it. The combat is just not interesting to me. It never was. In all the roughly 5,000 hours I’ve put into it, I’ve never thought it was fun. It was just something to be endured while questing and grinding.

    (And the one non-combat thing to do in the game is Tales of Tribute, but I truly despise it, and do not believe a collectible card game has any place in an MMO.)

    Zenimax Online has made stunning announcements about new content, systems, quality of life upgrades, and game modes coming to the game over the next couple of years. That’s great. Great for the long-term prospects of the game as a business, and great for the people who like it.

    Unfortunately, all this does is make my OCD tingle. There will be thousands of hours of content added as well as thousands of new achievements to earn. The thought of it is overwhelming, and the reason has taken me years to articulate: I want to complete the content, but I can only do that through the combat I don’t enjoy. This is why it feels overwhelming to me. I don’t enjoy the process.

    That was my reason for leaving last time. I was obsessed with grinding out achievements at the expense of the terrible combat, and it was hurting my mental health. Once all of this new content lands, the problem would be multiplied for me.

    Perfect example time. I decided to try veteran Vateshran Hollows. I’ve done it several times on regular, but never cleared it on vet. I figured with all the power creep from subclassing, I’d have a pretty good shot at it. Since coming back, I got everything leveled and got all new meta gear, so I followed Hyperiox’s guide on making a solo build, and went in. It was 2 hours of frustrating grind. After 17 deaths and the third wipe on the final boss due to some mechanic of one particular enemy that I wasn’t understanding, I just quit. I simply closed the game. Then I went to Steam and turned off auto-renew on ESO+.

    (I logged back in to remove all my items in the guild store so they wouldn’t expire and then be deleted in emails I never open, because I had a couple million-gold items up for sale.)

    The start of these sweeping changes landed yesterday. I successfully ignored my curiosity to log in and look at them.

    Some people like the process of getting your head bashed in for a couple of hours, reading a guide and watching a video, and then trying again, until they’ve mastered all 50 different fights in a particular dungeon. I could do that. I was already very close on the first try. But what I finally realized is that I don’t enjoy that, and never will, and I’m tired of pretending that I do. A run of the thing is about an hour, once you know what you’re doing. (The speed run time limit is 45 minutes.) That sounds more manageable, but who knows how many runs it would take for me to get to that kind of time.

    And then I realized that you need to clear it ten times to unlock all the perfected weapons.

    This was the final straw for me. I don’t enjoy this combat. I don’t enjoy the grind. I don’t enjoy the process. So, for the third and, I think, final time, I’m retiring.

    I’m just quiet quitting this time. Last time, I made announcements with my guilds. This time, I’m just going to let it fallow. Making announcements makes people uncomfortable, regardless of my autistic need to put a cap on it. People come and go all the time. I finally figured out that it’s part of the unwritten community rules to not talk about it, so there’s no pressure either way. So I can only blog about it. Sorry, world.

    I like the thought of doing content with other people now, instead of just playing single-player games. That was the best part of ESO, running dungeons and trials with guilds. I’ve looked around at a lot of replacements. I’ve heard the skill ceilings are quite high in both Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV, so that puts me off of them. I want to like Destiny 2. The gunplay seems to be the right style of combat for me. But everyone agrees that the game is not in a good place right now, and it’s famously inscrutable to new players. I’ve played a few hours, and it’s not clicking. Bungie is promising a refresh, but it’s been pushed several months, due to having their hands full with Marathon, I’m sure. So I’m going to keep an eye on this.

    I still love Fallout 76, bugs and crappy RNG and all.

    Posted in Gaming | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

    Back to the Wharghabl

    I’ve reactivated my twitter account, just shy of deletion. I did it to keep up with AI developments and tech news in general. And, boy, what a time to return to watching this scene in real time, with the Oracle layoffs, and the leaking — and immediate rewrite — of Claude’s “harness.”

    Even though I can’t bring myself to not follow a few key politicians (Thomas Massie, Rand Paul), I will try to minimize political content in my feed by not engaging with any of those posts.

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    Yes, It Really Is That Bad

    Outrage as Oracle makes thousands of foreign-worker requests amid layoff bloodbath

    According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data, Oracle filed for roughly 3,126 petitions to employ H-1B workers in fiscal years 2025 and 2026. Employers must submit the paperwork when seeking to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations like technology. Some 436 of those petitions were filed this year alone.

    Amazon, which in January said it would axe 16,000 corporate employees, has filed for some 2,675 H-1B petitions during the same two-year fiscal period. That came on top of news in October that the retail giant was axing 14,000 corporate workers.

    According to AI search results, there were 245,000 tech layoffs last year. We’re already at 90,000 this year. Someone on TikTok referenced 340,000 layoffs from the government sector as well. But, sure, the unemployment rate is just 4.4%. Something, something, lies, damned lies, and statistics.

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    I Can’t Do this Any More

    I have tried to delete Twitter many, many times over the years, but I think this is the last straw. Every single day, I can see the following:

    • Our federal and state governments are utterly, shamelessly corrupt, and don’t even get me started on other world governments…
    • Privacy was a lost cause decades ago, and yet we still pretend there’s any left for anyone except the 1%
    • The criminal justice system has become 3-tiered: people at the top and bottom get away with l.i.t.e.r.a.l murder, and only the “middle class” gets punished
    • My entire 40 year career is at very real risk of being cannibalized by LLM’s
    • LLM’s are cannibalizing the entire world’s supply of chips and compute and financial investment
    • The open source world is getting taken over by the woke mob in real time
    • Every consumer-facing product and service is rapidly getting both more expensive and cheapened at the same time, and now requires an account with a subscription and tracking to even use
    • Housing has become almost completely inaccessible to people below the age of 40, and the trend is worsening, as “private equity” is moving down the chain into apartments and even mobile home parks
    • “Dating” apps have utterly destroyed personal relationships, and the answer for many is just to get on social media and rant about it, but not stop engaging with them
    • Microsoft has destabilized the entire gaming economy (which is bigger than movies now) with it’s boneheaded moves over the past few years
    • Apple keeps angling towards a unification of macOS and iOS (which they promised in 2018 they would never do), making a move back to Linux on the desktop attractive (but see the point about it all going woke)
    • Failing service-oriented businesses (like Uber) are now paying people pennies to record themselves doing menial tasks to capture training data to program the bots to take over doing these jobs
    • The birthrate has dropped below replacement levels for both the West and the East, and while this used to keep the billionaires awake at night, AI has become their hope, and that’s why all the world’s resources are being devoted to it now

    In short, there’s a figurative war going on against liberty and anything that enables it, including voting for a non-establishment candidate, general-purpose computing, and a middle-class income. They have also come for any and all channels of information you used to stay informed, and any and all entertainment you might have used to escape the horrors. We are being programmed from both ends. There is no escape. There is no relief.

    Between the government overreach, the surveillance built into every product, the restrictions and eventual deprecation of cash, and the burgeoning requirement for a verified ID to do anything (except vote, apparently), and the doomsday scenario slowly building to an inescapable conflagration in the Middle East, the world is crawling inexorably towards the events described in The Revelation, while at the same time pretending that it’s not happening exactly as prophesied.

    Every page of Twitter’s feed angers, upsets, and defeats my spirit, and I just can’t take it anymore. And I can’t do anything about any of this but be frustrated and disappointed. Even just replying is like spitting in the wind, because someone without a “name” doesn’t exist on the platform, not even if you pay. So I can’t even register my dissatisfaction about what I’m reading.

    It’s all so utterly emasculating, humiliating, and depressing. The promise of a de-wokified Twitter was that it would become an egalitarian voice against power. In response, “power” has made moves which prove that they will not be held accountable, no matter how much is spoken about their misdeeds, their misplaced loyalties, and their greed. I don’t believe Musk thought this is where it would wind up in a couple of years, but I’m certain that “power” is absolutely delighted with the results, and that’s why no one is screaming about how Twitter needs to be taken away from him anymore.

    Posted in Politics | Tagged , | 1 Comment

    Ace, by Allie Sandt

    I’ve been losing my taste for all my old music lately. I’ve found a new vein of music on Apple Music, and this song in particular has been lodged in my brain for days. I finally stopped and looked up the lyrics, and now I think I know why. The explanation would be a bit too personal, even for this site, but it has helped me see more of myself, and for that I’m grateful.

    Don’t leave me in the dust
    Already can’t breathe
    I watch my troubles rust
    Just so I can go to sleep
    No damage to be done
    If I’m laying in the sun
    With a glaze over my eye
    And the people passing by
    I hand out second chances
    Like they’re my job to deliver
    You dry them out in the desert
    So I try to cry you a river
    Runs far
    In my mind
    To where you are

    Oh there’s that song again I know
    And it’s haunting me yeah it’ll never leave
    Oh there’s that song I never wrote
    And it follows me west to another sea

    My vision starts to go
    You’re all that I can see
    And life continues on
    For everyone but me
    Slow fading in the sand
    The river’s in my head
    But suddenly I see your hand
    And it reluctantly extends
    But are they second chances
    If pushed away when given?
    Please take another card
    I’m just some sad magician
    Ran far
    In my mind
    To where you are

    Oh there’s that song again I know
    And it’s haunting me yeah it’ll never leave
    Oh there’s that song I never wrote
    And it follows me west to another sea

    And as I take my final breath
    I hear that same old tune again
    And maybe it’s not what I lost
    But dreaming what it could have been

    Oh there’s that song again I know
    And it’s haunting me yeah it’ll never leave
    Oh there’s that song I never wrote
    And it follows me west to another
    Follows me west to another
    Follows me west to another sea

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    Updating the Ignored Wisdom

    In the age of “AI”, a graphic is now going around, which allegedly shows a slide from a presentation at IBM circa 1979.

    It makes great sense, which, of course, means that companies couldn’t care less. My prediction is that when the upper levels figure out how to get the consultants to use AI to produce an actual summary of the absolute buffoonery happening in the middle levels, we’re going to learn that the middle had more to fear from AI than the lower levels.

    Now someone has updated the slide for the obvious new use cases.

    But I hardly see the point of the comparison. We’ve seen decades of war crimes committed by both parties, and the only person who went to jail was one of the whistleblowers. It’s not like the Department of War has anything to fear over being held accountable for Geneva convention violations anyway.

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    It’s Made of Holes

    Many years ago, when I worked with English folks, I was about to go to Coventry, England. My coworker was telling me they were famous for their blood sausage. I asked what was in it. He said, “The holes.”

    “The holes?” I asked.

    “Yes, you know, the holes. The ear holes, the eye holes… the… holes.”

    This has stuck with me for almost 30 years now. All processed meat products are just the recombined leftovers of the real cuts.

    Pic for reference. 

    Posted in Humor | Leave a comment

    Adventures in Corporate IT Absurdity, SSL Certificate Edition

    After several years of developing my main Ruby on Rails project on my personal MacBook Pro, (like any sane developer), events have conspired to push me back to using my ossified corporate laptop for development. I didn’t expect to mind too much.

    Even though I’ve worked almost exclusively on a Mac for all these years, I’ve always made sure that the corporate laptop can do the job. I have admin access (so many places won’t allow this), so I can install Ruby via RubyInstaller, and go from there. I’ve even been able to install some nice-to-haves, like a good git GUI. (Tower, which, on a Mac is sublime, but at least has a Windows versions, and is dual-licensed, FTW.)

    What I wasn’t prepared for was the change in the workflow. Any tool that doesn’t use the Windows networking stack has to include the corporate firewall cert in its trust chain to access the internet. In the past, RubyInstaller has handled this “SSL problem” for bundler. I’ve had to work it into npm as well.

    However, I’ve upgraded my app to Rails 8, and RubyInstaller’s Ruby won’t run the app server any more, so I’ve been forced into using WSL. Now, I tried this early on (when it was a translation layer), and quickly decided that it was terrible, and fundamentally broken for Rails development. Microsoft rather quickly admitted defeat, and released a version 2 (which was a full VM). “It does what it says on the tin,” but I’ve avoided it ever since, because native Ruby worked just fine.

    Also I can’t use Kamal to deploy the app to a Linux VM, because that relies on key-based SSH authentication, and my company simply doesn’t allow it. I mean, are they supposed to support the industry-standard way of deploying web apps to Linux hosts or something!? Are you crazy? They have to put every session through Cyberark and log every keystroke, right!? So now I’m also forced to containerize the app, and deploy it to Azure’s Web Apps for Containers service, which is a terrible product with the worst dev tooling I’ve seen in 20 years of cloud services.

    So now I’ve spent literally days working out how to deal with the SSL problem in several more contexts.

    First, you have to get the WSL Linux made aware of my corporate certs. On Ubuntu, that involves putting them in /usr/local/share/ca-certificates and running update-ca-certificates.

    Okay, that wasn’t too bad, but it was still a new trick I had to learn.

    Second, you have to get the Docker image of the app aware of them, so that when you build the image, the build process can do things like install packages and bundle gems. In the Dockerfile, that involves something like:

    COPY ./script/misc/certs/theirs/firewall_bundle.crt /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/firewall_bundle.crt
    RUN update-ca-certificates

    Easy, right? It’s the same thing.

    Now there comes the problem of the az command. I tried to debug why my ASP container wasn’t running my image, so I naturally tried to do az webapp log tail... because the online version of the log viewer in Azure’s web portal is literal trash, and takes forever to scroll to the bottom. This has led to many hours of working through the issue with AI.

    The first error messages were, again, about SSL. After several back-and-forths, AI finally pointed out that the error messages were from Windows, and I had to learn the harsh lesson that WSL will “fall through” to running Windows binaries if it doesn’t find a native one. I complained to Claude, and he said:

    “Yeah, the Windows PATH passthrough in WSL is one of its worst design decisions.”

    So I installed the native Linux az command, and still the horrors persist. So I tried patching az‘s Python environment to include the certs. Then I got even weirder errors. Something about the corporate certs being broken because they don’t have an “AKI extension.” I complained again to Claude, and he said:

    Yeah. To summarize the chain of absurdity you just had to debug:

    1. Corporate firewall does SSL MITM with a malformed cert (missing AKI extension).
    2. WSL silently falls through to the Windows az. exe instead of telling you it’s not installed.
    3. Linux az ships with Python 3.13, which is stricter about certs than anything else on your system.
    4. AZURE_CLI_DISABLE_CONNECTION_VERIFICATION works for half the code paths but not the one you need.
    5. The Azure CLI’s own log streaming function doesn’t honor its own disable flag.

    None of that is your fault. It’s layers of bad defaults and incomplete implementations stacked on top of each other.

    An independent search on Google about SSL AKI gave me this snippet:

    Validation Issues: If the AKI is missing, malformed, or does not match the issuer’s SKI, it can lead to certificate verify failed errors, particularly in strict environments like Python 3.13 or with outdated proxies.

    Uh… yeah. No kidding.

    This is your brain. This is your brain on Windows trying to do anything that resembles modern web development. I can work around this, but, dang. Between Microsoft and #CorporateIT, this is so much harder than it needs to be. What a disaster. And I know what I’m doing.

    Posted in Programming | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment