Maybe it’s a result of having been a kid growing up in the 1980s, but I feel like a lot of well-meaning folks that are on about “Why isn’t the US doing more to directly support Ukraine?” really need to think through what it would mean for the US to be in a shooting war with Russia.

I also feel like we really don’t need more amateur, casually informed commentary and opinion about the situation in Ukraine, so I will be quiet now.

Holy cow! This new Tears For Fears album is really good.

UGH people who are constantly hiding and unhiding columns in Excel instead of splitting and freezing panes!

Whenever I am on hold with some sort of help desk or call center and the hold music is being interrupted every 15-30 seconds with an automated “We appreciate your patience, a representative will be with you shortly” message, it’s a dead giveaway that someone has done a localized optimization to hit their metric without thinking through the consequences.

“It’s the basic obstacle of artificial ecosystems. In a normal evolutionary environment, there’s enough diversity to cushion the system when something catastrophic happens. That’s nature. Catastrophic things happen all the time. But nothing we can build has the depth. One thing goes wrong, and there’s only a few compensatory pathways that can step in. They get overstressed. Fall out of balance. When the next one fails, there are even fewer paths, and then they’re more stressed. It’s a simple complex system. That’s the technical name for it. Because it’s simple, it’s prone to cascades, and because it’s complex, you can’t predict what’s going to fail. Or how. It’s computationally impossible.”

— Caliban’s War (The Expanse Book 2) by James S. A. Corey

Once again, I have given a Neal Stephenson book a shot and ended up quitting about a third of the way through. Dude really needs an editor.

A lot of people seem to like his stuff, though, so what do I know?