Scott Boehmer

Author: Scott Boehmer

  • The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth

    Meanwhile, the countries that might once have banded together to stop the fighting have lost interest or capacity. The institutions that might once have helped broker a cease-fire are too weak, and can’t or won’t help. “We live in a very interesting, many people call it, new world order,” Hamdok, the former Sudanese prime minister, told me. “The world we got to know—the consensus, the Pax Americana, the post–Second World War consensus—is just no more.”

    Anne Applebaum

    The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth (The Atlantic)

  • A Blue Screen :(

    On Thursday, I was in a hotel room using my laptop. It suddenly blue screened, and then when it restarted, something was wrong. After logging in, I got a bunch of error dialogs about various programs not being found or missing the permissions to access them. Then as I poked around, File Explorer claimed that I lacked permissions to open the main C:\ drive. Since I was on vacation, I just shut it down. I’d deal with it when I got home.

    The next evening, back home, I opened it back up. I plugged in a USB hard drive and copied the few files that weren’t in cloud storage already. Then I ran through the Windows reset flow in an attempt to get things working again. After a wait, I went through the Windows setup experience and then after setting up my account, logged in, and got a similar set of error prompts. The reset hadn’t fixed anything.

    At this point, I started digging in a bit more to see if I could figure out what the actual problem was. After a bit of poking around and comparing to my other computer, I came to the conclusion that the drive permissions had been messed up by the blue screen. At that point, I could either try to replicate the correct settings using my other computer as a template, or attempt a reformat of the drive.

    Since I had already erased everything from the computer, I decided to go ahead with a reformat. I created a bootable USB to reinstall Windows and then started that process all over again. This time, Windows setup informed me that it lacked network drivers and couldn’t reach the internet. I briefly tried to find the right drivers on my other computer and then copy them over, but the right way to accomplish that eluded me. Luckily, I have a USB wifi adapter, so I grabbed that and Windows setup was able to work fine through it rather than the onboard wifi.

    With the drive reformatted, Windows was finally working properly on my laptop again. The process of getting there was just a pain well beyond what a normal user could deal with. Reset should have examined and fixed the drive permissions, and with it not solving the issue, I think most people would just be stuck. If I wouldn’t have had a wifi adapter around, I’d have gotten stuck with no way forward without running to a store.

    Going through Windows setup twice also drove home just how hostile Windows has become to users. Setup tries to get you into subscriptions to Microsoft 365 and Xbox and then leaves your computer littered with recommendations (ads) and unwanted software. The clean Microsoft install was better than the Lenovo-customized reset (which included more pre-installed software), but neither was a good experience. It’ll be a while before the computer feels properly personalized again.

  • Giant Robot Fight Club

    Last week, a friend invited me to attend Giant Robot Fight Club at Motorco in Durham. It is a show where people dressed in cardboard robot suits battle one another in pro wrestling-style bouts. It was a ton of fun! If you’re in the area and have a chance to go, you should.

    Sold Out Show
    Robot Fight!
    Bot Man
    Automaton Selleck
    Animatronica
    The Masticator
    Seam Ripper vs Table
    Terror Byte

  • Boiling Water

    There’s a thought that sunlight is the best disinfectant, that by exposing fascists as fascists and Nazis as Nazis, it will raise awareness of the truth of what they are, and thus will turn people away from them. This seems to hold a certain logic, but my problem with it is that by any reasonable metric we have been testing the theory out to the maximal degree for at least the last decade, and the exact opposite effect has happened. I think we have to assume that actually sunlight has a normalizing effect.

    A.R. Moxon

    Boiling Water (The Reframe)

  • More AI Necromancy

    I posted about how gross it felt to use generative AI to create an avatar of a dead person back in May (AI Necromancy), and now there is another example with Jim Acosta interviewing a piece of video generating software that is making use of a dead kid’s appearance. This feels so incredibly wrong, and everyone involved, from Acosta and the parents to the developers building the software, should be ashamed of themselves.

    Jim Acosta, the former CNN chief White House correspondent who now hosts an independent show on YouTube, has published an interview with an AI-generated avatar of Joaquin Oliver, who died at age 17 in the Parkland school shooting in 2018.

    Ethan Shanfeld

    Jim Acosta Interviews AI Version of Teenager Killed in Parkland Shooting: ‘It’s just a Beautiful Thing’ (Variety)

  • Trump vs Facts

    Fumbling around in a fog of vibes and misinformation and things you saw on Fox News is good enough for the president; why should the rest of us ask for anything better? Soon, no one will know what is happening—what the problem is, or what remedies to apply. What sectors are booming and which are contracting, whether interest rates should be higher or lower, whether it’s hotter or colder than last year, whether mortality has gone up or gone down. It will be vibes all the way down. Soon we will all be bumping around helplessly in the dark.

    Alexandra Petri

    Trump Gets Rid of Those Pesky Statistics (The Atlantic)

    In a different era, each of these stories would have defined months, if not more, of a presidency. Coming in such quick succession, they risk being subsumed by one another and sinking into the continuous din of the Trump presidency. Collectively, they represent an assault on several kinds of truth: in reporting and news, in statistics, and in the historical record.

    David A. Graham

    A Terrible Five Days for the Truth (The Atlantic)

  • You Should Use RSS

    Perhaps you’ve heard of RSS. It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it allows websites like blogs, newsletters, and news sites to make their content available in “feeds” for outside services called “RSS readers” or “feed readers”. Far from being the new hotness attracting glitzy feature stories in tech media or billions in venture funding, RSS has been around for 25 years.

    …

    I’ve been heavily using RSS for over a decade, and it’s a travesty more people aren’t familiar with it.

    Molly White

    Curate your own newspaper with RSS (citation needed)

  • Bandcamp Friday

    Bandcamp does a promotion called Bandcamp Friday where they waive their revenue in order to give more to the artists when you buy their music. Today is a Bandcamp Friday, so here are some artists that I think you should check out. I know I’ll be buying songs from a few of them today.

    Sylvan Esso: One of the localish artists that I found thanks to an article about Psychic Hotline. I bought What Now recently and it has been a pretty regular entry in my listening rotation.

    Daughter of Swords: Another artist I found through Psychic Hotline. I picked up their album Alex last month and have really enjoyed listening to it.

    Made in 1985: I went to school with Scott, and he’s a cool guy not just because he shares my name and we chatted in some art classes twenty-some years ago. I’ve bought a bunch of his music over the past few years.

    Rogue Radio: Louise Sugden is a former Games Workshop employee who has a hobby-focused YouTube channel called Rogue Hobbies. She also has made some music.

    neon shudder: neon shudder did soundtrack albums for the Hard Wired Island roleplaying game. That album is one of my daughter’s top picks when her and I are driving somewhere.

    Lofi Girl: This is actually a label with songs from a bunch of different artists. They do a mix of big and small albums. One of my favorite is chill beats for LEGO building, but I also enjoy their seasonal releases like Halloween 2023 and Christmas 2023.

  • How Do We Get Out of This Mess?

    Robert Reich shares 15 ways that he thinks we could improve things in the United States.

    How Do We Get Out of This Mess? (YouTube – Robert Reich)

  • Impeachment is a Duty

    Happily, it so happens there is a very specific remedy set aside within our Constitution specifically for the occasion of a president posing a threat to our democracy and its people and the Constitution itself. This process is known as impeachment. There is a new reason to impeach Donald Trump every day—one reason at least. And yet motions to impeach are few and far between. There have only been 14 attempts so far, and only 3 this year, which is amazing in a dismaying sort of way.

    A.R. Moxon

    Impeachment is a Duty (The Reframe)