Recommended shows

I have a lot more personal stress than usual lately, combined with the daily terrible global news (suddenly I care much more about how crappy the world is), makes for a depressing outlook and a general feeling of misery. 

So I'm going to talk about things I like today.

Recently I've seen some very good shows, so here are a few I recommend:

Upload: This is a light-hearted, techy, sort-of sci-fi dramedy (mostly comedy) and it's just been fun. It takes place in the near future (maybe 20-50 years), and I will say some of the predicted tech/gadgets are so dystopian, pessimistic and reflective of some of the worst innovations of today that they feel like certainties. 

Worth a watch if only for those, but the show has a ton of fun with the concept of uploading your consciousness into a digital "heaven" upon death that even when the story is lacking, everything else makes up for it. But don't worry, the story is mostly fine and so is the acting. Available on the evil Amazon Prime.  

The Expanse: Probably the best sci-fi show in the last 10 years. Possibly the best sci-fi show ever. 

Season one took me a while to get used to. I remember watching it years ago, and gave up after 3 or 4 episodes. But I re-watched them and started to like it. Once you get it, and get comfortable with it, everything clicks and the show is freaking amazing. I think maybe season 5 is the best, but 6 is pretty damn good too. But if you haven't watched it, and if you like serious sci-fi, and if you can take in 4-5 episodes of season 1, you will be immensely rewarded. Honestly, season 1 isn't even that bad, I don't know what my problem was. I think it was just getting used to the belter accents. 

Anyway, I don't want to spoil anything nor spend all day writing about it, so I will say this: the effects are as good or better than big-budget films, with realistic space physics, while using mostly realistic scale (space is huge), which is refreshing not to have your intelligence insulted for the sake of storytelling. The drama, politics, conflicts, and the people are compelling. A few questions remain unanswered at the end of the show, but most were answered and I cannot remember seeing such a great show with a worthy ending. Extremely recommended. Also available on Prime.

Reacher: I watched this recently and just felt compelled to binge watch it. It's like a book you can't put down. Almost non-stop action, not big-dumb-Michael-Bay action, but the kind that you can follow, makes sense, leads from one point to another, and provides the occasional twist. 

The show is a little surprising. Jack Reacher, the hero, turns out to be more than the one dimensional stereotypical action figure. I'll just say things aren't so black and white and it's very well done. Great acting, great action, great characters, good story, and it all works incredibly well together. Highly recommended. Also on Prime.

The Witcher: This show is almost great. But there are some questionable set designs and actors that prevent me from completely gushing over it. But I will gush a little because many things about it are well-done. 

Henry Cavill is perfect as Geralt and crushes the performance as well as Geralt slays monsters. Most of the CGI stuff is really good, I really can't complain. A lot of it feels like a lived-in fantasy world with real characters, but then other moments feel like they cheaped out and the sets are sterile, some of the dialogue is lazy (old-world style fantasy characters using colloquialisms straight out of 2022 America is sloppy), and the acting feels forced at times (typically from the secondary characters). Overall though, it's nice to have a mostly competent fantasy show. Available on Netflix.

Remember when Apple fought for privacy? Good times

Years ago, Apple famously (or infamously, depending on your POV) refused to create a backdoor for the government to get in criminals' phones. Here's the Wikipedia article.

Recently, as you might be aware, Apple announced it plans to scan users' photos in order to fight child abuse.

[Note: I am very much pro-privacy. I do not need and refuse to post a disclaimer saying I am against child abuse because that's insane, and would do little to protect me from idiots who have no issue assuming others are totally okay with child abuse.]

On Thursday, Apple surprised the tech world by announcing that it will actively scan some users’ iPhones for known images of child sexual abuse material. The company also plans to discourage Siri searches for this material and warn children against sending or receiving sexually explicit messages, all starting with the launch of iOS 15 this fall.

The news drew a quick backlash from security experts and civil liberties groups, who believe the company is standing on a slippery slope by adding these content-scanning systems to its devices. The news also seems to have raised some objections inside Apple, as the company has stood behind its system in a memo to employees.

Apple is doubling down. They described opponents of this terrible idea as the "screeching voices of the minority." With that logic, we should mandate that every smartphone record everything and compare the data to what other people decided was bad. It would surely save lives, prevent child abuse and much more! From Pixy at Ace's:

Dismissing the entire security community, which has universally decried this, and the entire privacy community likewise as "screeching voices of the minority" shows exactly where this is coming from.

They are fully aware that what they are doing is wrong. They know it will harm people. That's why they kept it secret. They just don't care.

This is the end result of intellectual monoculture. To whatever small extent they spoke to any security or privacy advocates about this, their concerns were overridden because by definition anyone objecting to this was evil.

Cupertino delenda est. 

The apparent and increasing inability of the upper echelons in tech to question their own beliefs, to be genuinely open to disagreement, and to do so without assuming bad faith of their opponents is frankly disturbing. 

Let's make America a one party state

It will be two parties, but when it matters, we'll really just be the one party state of elitists controlling the flyover cavemen and blue city drones.

That's the strong impression I get from the Democrats and their "Republican" NeverTrumper friends. 

The clown show on January 6th apparently was on par with the Civil War, and we're gonna have to start screening/censoring people's text messages:

Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.

What the hell is going on? Our elitists and the people writing for old man Biden are so rabidly partisan or so completely out of touch (probably both), that speeches like this happen:

Biden says Trump supporters are worse than slave-owning Confederates: "We are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That's not hyperbole...The Confederates back then never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did"

You CAN oppose HR1 & 1/6... pic.twitter.com/Jz8z95owPR

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 13, 2021

I'm done distinguishing between antifa, green terrorists, any lunatic to the left of Reagan and the Democrats, because they never extend the same courtesy to the right and actively and consistently use bad apples to get things to go their awful way.

Call in sick and jump down rabbit holes

I'm not really calling in sick, but I think I should. And I just may someday as I'm exhausted and sick of the daily grind. 

I'm not a workaholic, but I rarely take sick days (they are mostly reserved for rare, scheduled doctor appointments). Then I saw this video, after watching this video. And I just want to spend the day watching and learning. Maybe you should too, someday.

New Lincoln MKZ will drive for you

No this isn't some proto-type Google car that is fully driverless (and consequently kept fully out of the marketplace), but a real car that anyone with a little money can buy and "drive" home.

Click the image to watch, and skip forward to about 2:20 to see this moron finally show us what we want to see:

A forward-looking camera mounted in the windshield mirror assembly reads lane markings and, if it determines you’re about to drift out of your lane, steers the car back toward the center of the lane... You start to drift out of your lane, even going around a corner, and the steering wheel magically cranks over and points you back toward the centerline.

It also has long-range radar-equipped cruise control that can match the speed of the car in front of you; it even works with the Lane Keeper technology.

Amazing how vehicle tech is advancing, but I fear by the time we get fully automated driving, virtually nobody will need to commute anymore.