Category: politics (Page 1 of 20)

I went into a hole, and didn’t write anything for 15 days.  Nor read the Internet, messed around on twitter, read discord, or did anything but start the new job.  I’m sort of behind on all the things, and I haven’t done or read or thought about anything except new job in weeks.

Except, I read the Jeffrey Goldberg Atlantic article when it popped up in my feed.  (I read all news via highly curated RSS in Feedly.  I do not get my news from random Internet posts.  So should you.)  If you are the one person on Earth who hasn’t read the article yet, or you are like me and decided what your life needed was a more challenging job in a pandemic and you haven’t seen it, here it is:

Trump: Americans who Died in War are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’

Despite knowing, understanding, and internalizing how terrible a human being Donald Trump is, my reaction to this article was fast, visceral, and active disgust.  Yes, while there is pushback going on right now as he rallies his allies to his side and ride their white steeds to FOX News, there’s zero doubt any of this story is true.

• There’s a C-SPAN clip on him bagging on John McCain in 2015 as a loser for getting captured in Vietnam.
• He refused to attend John McCain’s funeral.
• He has disparaged Gold Star Families.
• He’s called widows of the fallen and made them cry.
• He called generals “losers and babies” to their faces.
• He wants military parades but doesn’t want to include the injured because “nobody wants to see that.”
• He refused to honor the Marine Dead of WWI on the 100th anniversary of the war because his hair might get wet.

Should I go on?  There’s dozens of examples of Trump calling the military “losers.”  My reaction wasn’t to the piece but seeing it all in one place. I wasn’t even surprised.  But I was disgusted.  The story of the US Military is, for better or for worse, the story of America herself.  We can discuss the pros and cons of the veneration of the military all day, but Christ almighty.  The line was, as they say, firmly crossed.  My reaction goes deep.

His supporters — the only line they have to defend him — is that he doesn’t hate the troops, he just sounds like an asshole.

I finally crossed a line.  If people in my life want to support Trump, that’s your prerogative but you keep it far the hell away from me because there’s something deeply wrong with him, and by that definition, you.  Leadership flows from the top.  He’s a deeply vile human being, a rot that comes right out of his soul.  You want to follow vileness, fine, but it tars your soul, too.   Everything he touches he corrupts, and that includes the people who somehow still follow him.

How anyone thinks someone who craps all over the US Military should be Commander in Chief is far beyond me or my ability to comprehend humanity.   How anyone can support someone so innately awful who has such contempt for his fellow human beings is beyond me.

This is just ugh.  So awful.  So very awful.

Everything else going on is fine.  I’m not really doing anything — not really reading or writing or indulging in any hobbies right now.

School starts on Tuesday and that should be a real treat for all of us.

Stats:

• 80,718,811 completed tests
• 6,177,201 positive cases
• 189,555 dead from COVID-19
• 111,332 cases in MD with 3,891 deaths
• 1 in 72 people have it in Howard County.

I hate to be the dick in the room but this COVID thing is still here.  Remember that?  The thing that is killing people at a good clip?  I thought it would get better in two weeks but it looks like this COVID-19 thing hasn’t gone anywhere.  We’re still losing 1000 people a day.  We’re still clocking in at 50K positive tests a day.  I guess we’re ok with that.

Maybe while Donald Trump isn’t getting the pandemic under control, he can call more people losers and suckers.

I was a little busy this week.  I’ll be a little busy next week.  And the week after.  It’s a good busy, but it is busy busy busy busy and I feel drained and it feels like something crawled into my brainmeats and died.  People know what the job is, now.  Onboarding is hard.

I never got around to reading War and Peace — it’s on the list, and it might be higher now for Reasons — but I saw this quote from it the other day:

With the enemy’s approach to Moscow, the Moscovites’ view of their situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger approaching. At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second. So it was now with the inhabitants of Moscow. It was long since people had been as gay in Moscow as that year.

Napoleon is on the march.  He’s burning his way through Europe.  He’s headed toward Moscow.  He’s a clear and present danger.  And when Napoleon arrives in Moscow, he and his army will kill everyone and burn the city to the ground.

Do the Moscovites’ prepare for the coming onslaught?  No, of course not.  They party.  The closer Napoleon comes, the more they party.

War and Peace is the entire American answer to… all of 2020, really.  There’s the oncoming onslaught.  The right thing to do is prepare for it.  But preparing for it is too hard, too painful, too much to think about.  Let’s instead it will simply go away one day — it will just disappear, like a miracle — and go party instead.  Maybe Napoleon will change his mind?

Like everyone else, I thought Biden’s speech last night was good.  He was angry, which came as a surprise.  Uncle Joe is never angry, not like that.  But he was angry for all of us.  He’s offended that anyone sat aside and let the virus harm Americans.  It offends him deep in his core.

It does help that Trump went out of his way to set all these expectations about Biden’s compromised brain. Biden’s brain is not compromised (he is a bit slower now, though), he has a stutter.  But we don’t let those details get in the way of Trump.  So Trump set these expectations and lowered expectations for Biden immensely and then Biden sailed over them and now, well, Trump has to pass his own bar.  Which he won’t.

Trump’s spell is starting to break.  The Democrats no longer fear his twitter feed, and the Never Trumpers are right behind.  Once the fear is gone, he’s nothing but a crazy, ranting old man.

I’m cheesed at the Biden-Harris store right now because they will not sell me a magnet.  I’ll need to get a sticker pack and hang it in a clip instead.  Dammit.  I’m not going to just donate money. I require swag in return.

Stats:

• 69,604,861 tests completed
• 5,553,197 positive cases
• 176,372 dead from COVID-19
• 103,317 cases in MD,  3,781 dead
• 1 in 77 people have it in Howard County, MD

We’re getting all the school emails and yes, it’s remote learning for a month and then re-evaluate.  We’re going to be hyper strict about school this fall, and use the big white board to track assignments and classes.  It happens at the desk, dressed, ready to go, with camera on.  This will be… horrible.

Sorry about the lack of posting lately.  My brain has been tofu and I have been, to put it mildly, distracted.  Today, my short interregnum of being unemployed came to an end; but now I work in an underground bunker in an undisclosed location.

I’m mostly exhausted.  I haven’t slept nightmare-free in weeks, and last night was no exception.  I’m becoming concerned that we’re going to have a country-wide case of PTSD once this is all over.  PTSD from the pandemic, PTSD from Trump, PTSD from all the crazy.  They’re going to have to dump PTSD meds into the water supply.  I no longer have insomnia.  Nope, now I have this instead.  Woo.

I’m hoping the feeling of forwardness I’ll get now will help with the gray haze problem.  Everything from March until today has been a grey haze without much forward momentum, but maybe now that will change. New things will fill my brain for the next several months and by time I wake up from it, it’ll be Thanksgiving.  At least I’ll be extremely entertained by learning new things and that will perk me up a bit.

I think I’m going to give the Dems a miss.  I never miss a convention, but it’s so… the Internet will tell me what the good bits are and I’ll go watch the good bits.

Here’s some dumb stuff I’ve been up to last few days:

I realized this weekend that I’m still incapable of reading dense academic non-fiction.  I put the Venetian spies to the side — despite having highlighted half the book — and picked up Fonda Lee’s “Jade City” instead.  Which has turned out to be awesome.   It won’t last long.  The characters are a little flat, but it’s balanced out by all the crime lord kung-fu.

We watched the first episode of Lovecraft Country and I thought it was amazing.  I’m kicking myself for not having read the book earlier, especially as I like Matt Ruff’s work.

We finished the second season of Doom Patrol.  It just… stops… because the pandemic halted filming, and that made me sad.

We discovered the Harley Quinn animated series now that DC Universe is getting subsumed into HBO Max and it’s… uh… I dig it.  I think it’s great.  But I found it a little surprisingly hard-R at first, and I had not steeled my brain against it.  Now that I have, I’m team Poison Ivy.

We’re working our way through Picard now, having inhaled all of Discovery.  I totally get why people don’t like Picard, but it comes from having read multiple Michael Chabon novels.  Picard is Star Trek as written by Michael Chabon.  It’s going to be more thinky, more pondery, more talk about the philosophy of things than sort of a smash and grab Star Trek episode.  I don’t think that’s what people want out of Star Trek.  Right now, I still really like it, but I’m ok with more meditative “what is life, what are Romulans” Star Trek.  (Also, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is one of my all time favorite books.)

I need to pick up all my Rust projects, so they’re going to bump my ML projects down a notch.  Yes, I will finish the brain transplant for birdcam, and move the predict service to somewhere sustainable.  But then I need to go back to the Rust game engine.  There’s suddenly a pressing need for me to get to passingly adequate in Rust.

And… I think that’s it.  Oh, I have this new Razer Blade, and it’s baller.  Best computer I’ve ever owned, hands down.  Take that, Apple.

Stats:

• 67,621,119 completed tests
• 5,380,726 positive results
• 172,087 confirmed dead from this damn thing
• 100,772 cases in MD with 3,746 dead
• 1 in 79 have it in Howard County

First off, Hogan went all we’re doing great today and I don’t really see it.  That Howard County number is just creeping toward me.  Now it’s 1 in a movie theater has it.  Even a socially distant movie theater.

Second, we crossed 170K somewhere recently and no one seems to care.

We, as Americans, are just idiots.  We are deliberately choosing not to get this under control.

I am sitting on my deck doing two things right now:

• Freaking out from having a good solid case of imposter syndrome around the new job believing I don’t know how to write code or do deeply technical things anymore because hey I don’t really do that anymore and it’s all going to go quite poorly next week and…
• Upgrading and rewriting a bunch of python 3.8 code on my raspberry Pi (after I patched up Debian) to more “adult” code with coroutines using aiobotocore on the AWS calls and using the new typing library after I figured out how to get remote ssh to work through visual studio code (yay .ssh) and integrating my Yolov3 detection code into the service so that it processes detections locally because it’s ok if it sits and ponders for 6-7 seconds.  This after I rearranged and extracted my ML code into a portable module and banged out some crap code this morning to walk a directory of images, pass them through the detector, drop the guys who have no boxes found, and load them up into a CSV so I could see that Yolo occasionally believes I am taking pictures of fire hydrants and also of bears.

So either I know what I’m doing or I don’t.  It’s like Heisenberg’s uncertainty knowledge. Or I should be ok with being able to bang out perfectly acceptable data science python, accept that I’m good enough for now, and move on with my life.

I’m pretty wrecked about the death of the Big 10 Football season.  I knew it was coming a mile away but it’s terrible that it’s here.  I have no interest in the kids going out to play in dangerous conditions but, on the other hand, there’s no really good reason why we have dangerous conditions at all except extreme negligence.  This one is a deeply emotional blow.  We’ve now decided as a society that we’re not going to have college football because we decided as a society that we cannot be adults and do the thing that needs adulting and grow up.  We have decided that we don’t have things anymore.

(Slate has this blow by blow of how Trump killed Americans and destroyed the country — and football — if you can stomach it.)

It’s just another thing that has died in this pandemic on a long list of things that have died: the economy, travel, vacations, going to the movies, going to the mall, going out to eat, summer hanging out on people’s decks, new media coming out, MLB (mostly), school in the fall, fall sports, the global reputation of the United States.  And we’re ok with all these things dying because… mah freedomzzzzz. MAH FREEDOMZZZZZZZZ!  GIMME MAH FREEDOMZZZZZZZZZ!  BIRDS AND GUNS AND SHIT BLOWING UP AND FREEDOMZ!

God.  Take your freedomz and just go away.  I’m so angry about it all I want to explode. I just don’t understand how any sane person can… be ok… with this.

Also, one day I will remember all the commands for systemd but today is not that day.  And I’m busy trying to convince my Pi that it’s ok to run some Fortran.  It doesn’t believe me.

Stats:

• 61,792,571 total completed tests.
• 5,028,806 total positive results
• 164,900 dead
• 96,065 cases in MD with 3,682 dead
• 1 out of 84 people have it in Howard County

When do we care about the number of the dead?  200,000?  250,000? 1,000,000?  It feels like no one cares that 165K people are dead from this thing who didn’t need to be dead.  Are we that level of sociopaths?  This whole thing is incomprehensible to me, day after day, week after week. I just don’t get it.  How horrible of a people are we?

I am sitting out on my deck with my portable fan blowing in my face learning how to manipulate Yolo v3  so I can upgrade my prediction algorithms and set up birdcam once again.

For those who do not know, the plan behind birdcam — completely derailed by the pandemic — is this:

• Have a raspberry pi hooked to a passive infrared sensor (a PIR) to sense movement.
• When sensed movement, take a picture with the onboard camera.
• Convert the image into digits and pass it through an ML object detection algorithm.
• If it believes that it has found a bird, then store the image in S3 and send out a message.  And perhaps, tweet out birds, as is appropriate to twitter.
• If it has not seen a bird, then dump the image.

My original model had, like, a 63% accuracy, which was complete garbage.  That lead me down a path of sitting down and really learning the basics of Machine Learning (done), build some neural nets from scratch with their activator functions, also from scratch, in numpy so I actually knew what they were doing (done), understand how CNNs work by building one from scratch (done), learn how to make Keras do basic CNN things (done), and then, finally, start working with Yolo v3.

So, on vacation, I decided to be up to my armpits in data science python.  Which, of course, is nothing like regular python.  It’s a skill I did not have.  Right now, the yolov3.weights file is downloading and I shall endeavor to learn fun new things about transfer learning.

The problem with starting with keras is that you just sort of wire things together like magic lego bricks.  Oh, it’s a multi-classifier, I guess I need a crossentropy loss function.  It’s a regression, so I’ll use MSE and RMSE.  And you just plug those things into the workflow and out pops a trained model all ready to get saved, slurped onto a PI somewhere, and off it goes.

I liked learning all the math but with the pandemic and my brain fully tapioca’d it took freaking forever.  That said, I can do a CNN for my image classifiers and do RNNs for the time series of the hydroponics data collection to predict when a plant needs water.  I now have that power under my control.

Also, I installed pylance in my visual studio code setup and it feels like programming-based cheating with all the type checking and inspection and hotness.  20 years of python in vim and I’m like where has this been all this time?  It’s way too easy to get something done now.

There’s a fly that lives on this deck and no matter how much I wave at it it doesn’t stop buzzing my head.  I’ve brought out a fan, and the fan does wonders on all other bugs except the fly.  It is impervious to the fan.

Other than that, I read a comic.  I worked on my Mom’s site a bunch.  And that’s it.  Vacation it is.

I haven’t actually looked at the news today.  At all.  I feel better about the universe for it.

Stats:

• 59,652,675 total tests
• 4,869,058 confirmed cases
• 162,130 dead
• 93,601 cases in MD with 3,650 dead
• 1 in 87 people have it in Howard County

Hilarious fact!  The reason that the daily cases loads are going down isn’t because we have the spread of the virus under control.  NO!  It’s because test results are taking so long to come back that people aren’t getting tested at all.  That’s right.  People have simply stopped getting tested.  It looks like caseloads are going down but deaths are going up up up up!  Woo!  USA! USA!

Also, my kid’s school is rollout out the MOSH PIT mnemonic to help remember to wear masks and wash hands when on campus and man I am torn on that one.

I quit my job and today was my last day.  I am, suffice to say, extremely emotional and sad about this.  I was super proud of our little company.  I mean, I still am, I’m just not there anymore.   It was four and a half years of my life, and I poured everything that was me into it to make it work.  I lived and breathed the place.

I don’t talk about work in public — an old habit from Zenimax that has served me well and will serve me well into the future.  But because this is a blog about living through the pandemic, I can say there is a straight line correlation between changing jobs right now, making an insane leap into the unknown when everything is remote and online, and the pandemic.  Because yes, I worked at a travel tech startup, and it’s an ugly, ugly time for travel tech startups in ways I cannot even begin to describe.  There aren’t words invented on Earth to describe my combination of rage and sorrow.  The travel industry is bad right now.  It’s bad.

Much of my rage I’ve poured out here on my blog at the pandemic — the lack of leadership, the lack of movement, the lack of testing, the lack of tracing, the complacency — was because I was directly impacted all day, every day, without end, with nothing I could do.  People would ask how was work and I’d say “oh it’s the apocalypse.” I’d rage at my blog and move on. Funny thing, at the new job I will be impacted all day, every day, without end, but in a much different and much weirder way.

It’s awful.

I will miss my job, and my team, terribly.  It was a great place with great people.  It still is, and I dearly hope that they survive this mess and come out stronger for it.  I can’t say enough positive things about the people.

This is the first time I changed jobs under my own power where I wasn’t like “that person X over there sucked.”  It’s like, this is bad, this situation is bad, the pandemic is bad, but at the end of the day, the fault lies at the feet of the pandemic and the horrific Federal response.  Had we had good Federal leadership, or a coordinated response, or we stifled it like the EU, it’s unlikely I would have jumped.  Or I would have thought much harder about it.  Or slow rolled and I would have stayed longer to see how well things recovered.  Had we returned to the ~60% travel as predicted by now… but we’re at 22% right now.  Globally.  It’s not getting better.  Not in 2020.

Fuck you, 2020.  Also, I am not a Donald Trump fan.

And I got a rare opportunity to do some good in the world, and I took it, because the world is so bad right now that I needed to take a job where I could punch evil right in the face.  There are other, ah, perks, that go with the job.

I’ll never talk about the new job on the Internet.  Don’t ask.  You can assume, if you know me, I chose the door labeled “crazy” because if there’s one thing I’m going to do, it’s acquire as many “no shit, there I was” stories before I die.

Lots of other things happened today but I don’t really care.

That was my day.  How was yours?

Stats:

• 58,903,657 completed tests
• 4,759,729 positive cases.
• 159,486 dead
• 92,420 cases in MD with 3,628 deaths
• 1 in every 87 has it in Howard County

Looks like the rate of finding infected people is slowing down again but the death rate is shooting up like mad.  ~1500 dead a day.  Christ, what are we even doing.  It’s a 9/11 every 2 days and I feel like no one cares or is arguing about the semantics of masks.