Yes, you shouldn’t be learning new things in an acceptance test, but sometimes you do.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
LinkedIn Weirdness
Well, the weirdness of some people on LinkedIn. Occasionally, I’ll make the mistake of accepting an invitation from someone, and they’ll immediately want to initiate a conversation with me, as though I have infinite time for such things. In some cases, it’s an attractive Asian woman (generally Chinese), which makes me suspect a scam. It would never occur to me to use LinkedIn as a penpal service, but apparently some people do.
[Update a few minutes later]
I should add that the easiest way to get them to stop bugging me is to tell them that I hate communicating on my phone (because they always want to chat on WhatsApp or Signal, or texting), which not only discourages them, but has the additional virtue of being true. When I tell them my preferred mode of communication is email, they tell me that they only use email for work. OK, your problem, not mine.
[Update on July 7th
Here’s an example of an invitation I just got. An Asian-appearing woman with a man’s name. Bizarre.
[Bumped]
AI Follies
An attempt to replace journalists goes awry.
Our New Space Race
A review of Ashlee Vance’s latest book. Highly recommended.
AI
Why it will save the world.
Not hot off the press, but worth a read from a smart guy.
Astra Carta
Bob Zimmerman isn’t impressed.
The Global Space Race
Assif Siddiqui says that we need new ways to think about it: “We need to let go of our nostalgia for Apollo and move on and work with different models to the old 1960s space races.”
I’ve been saying this for years.
Too Many Dishonorable People Are Honored
Hard to argue.
The Oceangate Disaster
An unofficial assessment from a submarine captain.
Rickover built a hell of an underwater navy, but basing the nuclear-power industry on submarine designs has been a mess.
Computer Weirdness
Since a recent update, my desktop has quit booting. I just says “Loading kernel,” with kernel number, and does nothing else. What’s worse is that I can’t even boot it from an external drive that I boot a Windows laptop with when I want to run Linux on it. The desktop doesn’t even recognize it as boot media, though it continues to work fine with the laptop.
[Sunday-afternoon update]
Patricia’s Windows 10 machine is the same MSI motherboard as mine, and I confirmed that it, too, does not recognize the external drive as bootable. I went back into Windows, and created a live-USB for Fedora, which did boot into both her machine and mine.
So, I decided to just create a new installation. I put it on a spare Samsung 250G SSD that I had. It has no problem installing it, but when I tried to boot from it, at first I couldn’t even see it in the boot menu in the BIOS. I changed from UEFI to CSM, at which point it appeared, and I made it the first boot. But when I tried to boot it, I got the same error message as when I tried to boot from the external drive. The machine continues to not recognize a Fedora boot disk as bootable.
[Bumped]
[Update Monday afternoon]
OK, after talking to MSI, I found out that I had been setting the boot order wrong, and finally got it working. I’m pretty much back to normal, except I need to clone the Samsung over to my M.2. If I didn’t keep /home on a separate drive, though, I’d be in a world of hurt.
[Bumped]