Peter Thiel is worried about the antichrist. It could be the US. It could be Greta Thunberg. [...]
On the day of Thiel's final lecture in San Francisco, as the mostly young and mostly male crowd lined up to get in, a group of about 20 protesters stood out front holding anti-Palantir and anti-Ice signs that said things such as "Predatory tech", "We do not profit from people who profit from misery" and "Not today Satan".
A trio of self-described "satanists" dressed in black costumes with goth makeup walked up and down the line of attenders carrying a goblet of red liquid with a small plastic replica of a bone. "Will you bring our dark lord Peter Thiel this baby's blood?" they asked. Then they performed what they called a "dark ritual", dancing slowly in a circle to Mozart's Requiem in D minor, which ended with them writhing on the city sidewalk, and yelling: "Take us to your personal hell ... Thank you for being our dark lord." [...]
Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: "It's become quite difficult to hide one's money."
I am constantly re-discovering that billionaires are some of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet.
With a new majority on the Board of Supervisors, along with control over the Mayor's and District Attorney's Offices, the school board, and the local Democratic County Central Committee, political power in San Francisco has been consolidated in the hands of so-called "moderates" funded by and friendly to the interests of the tech and real estate industries. Put in the language of our political moment, San Francisco's halls of power are awash with Abundance. Not coincidentally, San Franciscans are suffering more than ever in just about every measurable way, and City Hall is simply ignoring their plight. [...]
San Franciscans are highly preoccupied with Trump's shocking and constant attacks on democracy, ICE raids disappearing of our neighbors, and exacerbation of the two-year-long genocide in Gaza. Mayor Lurie barely acknowledges these issues. In contrast to big city mayors like Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Lurie refuses to take a stand against ICE kidnappings and his police department won't even protect those who do. Outrageously, SFPD's stated position is that its priority is to protect ICE agents from protestors.
This is a stunning lack of leadership for a Democratic mayor in a sanctuary city widely considered to be the nation's progressive heartland, at the precise moment when American fascism begs confrontation. But even more squarely on the plate of San Francisco's current leaders is the fact that local economic conditions have rapidly deteriorated for the city's working people and poor in the short time since they came into power.
Today, it comprises 69% of my total URLs served. (Nice.)
Normally it feeds junk after a few seconds delay, but in "high-load mode" it bans IPs for 30 days instead. High-load mode is entered when the free-worker count is low, and ends when it has been calm for 15 minutes.
This month it has been in high-load mode 50% of the time: 15 out of 30 days of traffic.
It is a small and self-contained PHP and JavaScript library for generating HTML tables of spreadsheet-like reports, including arithmetically-computed cell values.
I did this while refactoring some of DNA Lounge's internal business systems to have simpler code and less duplicated logic. This let me delete so much code!
But it took me a while to actually bite the bullet and do it. "I am not going to write a spreadsheet", I kept saying to myself, "that's stupid."
"Ok, maybe just a little bit of a spreadsheet. This far no farther."
"Ok, maybe just a little bit more."
As the Big Black song says, "I tell myself I will not go, even as a drive there."
Open AI has recently announced deals worth $600 Billion with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle. OpenAI is able to spend hundreds of billions of dollars they do not have because those companies are paying that same money back to OpenAI via investment. The infinite money glitch means that stocks keep going higher as more circular revenue cycles between the same players.
If you’re of a certain age (and not American), there’s a specific corporate font you’re most likely aware of. You may not know its exact name, and you may not actively remember it, but once you see it, you know exactly what you’re looking at. The font’s called Nokia Sans (and Nokia Serif), and it was used by pretty much every single Nokia device between roughly 2002 and 2013 or so, when it was replaced by a very bland font made by Bruno Maag (with help from the person who designed Comic Sans) that they used after that.
I can’t remember why, exactly, but I got majorly nostalgic for Nokia’s characteristic, recognisable font, and decided to see if it would work as a user interface font. Now, the font is still owned by Nokia and I couldn’t find a proper place to download it, but I eventually stumbled upon a site that had each individual variant listed for download. I downloaded each of them, installed them using KDE’s font installation method, and tried it out as my user interface font.
You’ll quickly discover you shouldn’t use the regular variant, but should instead opt for the Nokia Sans Wide variant. Back in 2011, when Nokia originally announced it was replacing Nokia Sans, the creator of the font, Erik Spiekermann, responded to the announcement on his blog. Apparently, one of the major reasons for Nokia to change fonts was that they claimed Nokia Sans wouldn’t work as a user interface font, but Spiekermann obviously disagrees, pointing specifically to the Wide variant. In fact, Spiekermann does not pull any punches.
After 10 years it was high time to look at Nokia’s typefaces as the dominant visual voice of the brand but whoever decided on a completely new direction was either not aware of what was available or was persuaded by Bruno Maag to start over. Bruno may not create the most memorable typefaces, but he certainly knows how to sell them. And technically, their fonts are excellent. Too bad they didn’t have the confidence to work with me on an update. Instead they’re throwing out ten years of brand recognition in favour of blandness.
I was pleasently surprised by just how nice the font looks when used as a general user interface font. It’s extremely legible at a variety of sizes, and has a ton of character without becoming gimmicky or overbearing. What originally started as mere curiosity has now become my UI font of choice on all my machines, finally displacing Inter after many years of uncontested service. Of course, all of this is deeply personal and 95% an issue of taste, but I wanted to write about it to see if I’m just entirely crazy, or if there’s some method to my madness.
Do note that I’m using high DPI displays, and KDE on Wayland, and that all of this may look different on Windows or macOS, or on displays with lower DPI. One of Inter’s strengths is that it renders great on both high and lower DPI displays, but since I don’t have any lower DPI displays anymore, I can’t test it in such an environment. I’m also not entirely sure about the legal status of downloading fonts like this, but I am fairly sure you’re at least allowed to use non-free fonts for personal, non-commercial use, but please don’t quote me on that. Since downloading each variant of these Nokia fonts is annoying, I’d love to create and upload a zip file containing all of them, but I’m sure that’s illegal.
I’m not a font connoisseur, so I may be committing a huge faux pas here? Not that I care, but reading about font nerds losing their minds over things I never even noticed is always highly entertaining.
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