Tag: technology

I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching4 Comments

So we’ve got a new curriculum for math this year, and like most curricula in 2025 there’s what was supposed to be a robust online component to it. My kids took a math test last week, and I discovered while they were taking the test that a question about exponents that asked them to show their work had not provided any way to put a number into a superscript.

Which, y’know, feels like it might be a massive fucking oversight.

We’re moving into the real number system this week and they’re starting off with terminating and repeating decimals, so a lot of moving back and forth between decimals and fractions. I spent an hour beating my head against their system and for the life of me I cannot figure out how to designate a repeating fraction. Is there a help system? Of course not. Check this out:

It seems like typing in an answer, highlighting the repeating decimals and then clicking that tiny button which I had to hunt for for twenty minutes (and remember, my kids are working on iPads, which make highlighting anything a huge pain) puts the repeating decimal line– which is called a “vinculum,” by the way– above the numbers you’ve highlighted.

Take a second and stare at the options in that text box and reflect upon the fact that this is supposed to be for 8th graders. I do not have the slightest idea what probably 90% of the icons on that thing are referring to, nor do I really have any idea what is supposed to be designated by an arrow pointing at three diagonal dots.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work:

The top box is how it processed my entry. Why is there extra vinculum to the right of the seven? No idea, but it happened every time I tried. You’ll notice nothing extra is lined in the actual entry above. Why is the 27 in the bottom “correct” answer centered under the vinculum? Also no idea. I was not able to get a single answer correct involving a repeating decimal and absolutely nowhere was there any sort of help option that might have shown me what to do.

I sent an irate email to my team about how bullshit this was and I’m done for the night. I’m going to have these kids writing on the backs of shovels with coal by the end of the year. I’m so done with educational technology at this point that I can’t see straight.

First world problems

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy9 Comments

My current phone is an iPhone 14 Pro Max. Apple is a few days away from announcing the iPhone 17, and my phone has reached the point where on most days I have to charge it for a bit while I’m at my desk or doing something else; the battery isn’t getting through a full day reliably any longer. I used to replace my phone almost every year more or less whether I “needed” to or not; I’ve gotten out of that habit with the last few phones as they’ve gotten steadily more expensive.

So here’s my dumb problem: I don’t really want an iPhone 17 of any particular stripe, although it’d be highly unlikely that I would order anything other than another Pro Max. Not because I’m thinking of switching back to Android– I am Apple’s bitch now and forever, and am too thoroughly tied into their ecosystem to even seriously consider switching– but because their foldable phone is rumored to be coming out in 2026.

Rumors for the price of the foldable iPhone have ranged between two thousand and two thousand five hundred dollars, and that’s before whatever tariff fuckery might happen between now and next September.

That’s … a hell of a lot of money. And it’s even more money if I spend the $1200 or whatever I’m going to pay for a 17 in between now and then. And it’s also money that would be spent on a first-generation Apple product in a category that, so far, phone manufacturers have not exactly been covering themselves in glory with. Foldable phones are tricky as hell, and from what I’ve seen so far no one has really nailed the tech yet.

Now, for a sensible person who doesn’t have a spending problem, this isn’t actually a hard decision. I hold onto my current phone until it’s genuinely untenable to keep using it; if that’s before the Fold is released, well, that sucks, but it happened, and if the Fold comes out and I don’t like the price or something else about it (or they delay it, or the rumors are wrong, or or or … ) I just buy whatever the equivalent of my current phone is at that time.

That’s the sensible approach. But the sensible approach ignores the fact that I’ve been fighting off the newshiny for three years already, and I am maybe more sensitive than I should be to being annoyed by my phone– part of the reason I have a Pro Max is that I don’t like having to think about battery charge pretty much ever– and, like, September is the month you buy new phones. I recognize that all of this is stupid; that’s why I titled the post the way I did.

I could, in theory, try a smaller phone for a year, instead of buying the most expensive phone in their lineup. What would that be like? I don’t even know. But it would cut the pain a little bit if I decide to upgrade a year later.

Anyway. I have no common sense, but that’s why I have readers, who I assume are smarter people than me. What say you? Put up with bullshit for another year assuming I’ll want to trade up in 2026, upgrade but with a less expensive model so that it’s not as big of a hit in a year (worth pointing out: the trade-in will get me money back) or assume that I’ll manage to talk myself out of spending laptop money on a phone a year from now and just get the phone I’d be getting if I didn’t know anything about the Fold?

God, people, at least try

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy, Teaching1 Comment

So I’ve taken on an informal building tech nerd role this year, and in doing so I made a slight miscalculation: we have a lot of new staff this year, and on top of that there was a whole-building renovation over the summer. As it turns out, some of our contractors were not tremendously diligent about making sure that everything was connected properly, especially wiring in the wall that I can’t get at? It’s been fun.

On the other hand, four different people, all adults with college degrees, summoned me to their rooms today because Something Didn’t Work, only for me to discover in three of the four cases that Something wasn’t plugged in, and in the fourth case it lacked a power cord entirely.

Electronics need those!

I told everyone that shit happens and we were all a little stressed out and manic, so no big deal, but that if it happened a second time, I’d be charging my consulting rate.

Had dinner with some family from out of town tonight, and everyone was surprised to see me, which was kind of funny; that said, I’m planning on going to bed early tonight.

All right, let’s do this, damn it

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading3 Comments

Well, that was a fun little rabbit hole to fall into at 10:00 in the morning.

I posted these beauties not long after buying them, and they make me happy each and every time I walk past them, which was how I justified the $Jesusdon’task cost. The problem: despite their status as one of the non-negotiable canon series of fantasy literature, I haven’t finished the damn series. I’ve read the first … five? Six? and tried to reread/finish them a few years ago and had to tap out after the second book.

I’m doing this, damn it. I’ve spent a lot of money on this damn series and I’m stuffing it into my brain whether I want it there or not. I’m not stupid enough to try and read them straight through, though; I’ll commit to one a month (still over a year!) and try to go at least a little faster than that in practice.

(I plan to start with New Spring, the prologue, which I haven’t actually read yet. If you have strong feelings about whether I should hold off until later, let me know, but do keep in mind that I’ve read the first two books twice each already. You have, like, an hour or two until I’ve started it and can’t be stopped.)

I recognize that “I started a book!” maybe isn’t the most compelling blog content ever, but I wanted to mark the first date in something less ephemeral than Bluesky. So.

Anyway, that rabbit hole: I thought that I had posted about these books when I got them, and I couldn’t find the post at first. It took me a minute to track the post down, because the words “Wheel of Time” didn’t actually show up in the post title. I went to Google and searched “infinitefreetime wheel of time” and this bullshit happened:

Other than the first half-sentence of the second paragraph, none of that is fucking true. Those quotes? Not real. The AI made the whole thing the fuck up. I hate this fucking useless-ass, destructive-ass technology with every fiber of my being and I cannot wait for it to die, hopefully taking a large chunk of the stupider element of our tech sector along with it.

So, yeah. I’m starting up on Wheel of Time again, and fuck GenAI straight to Hell.

Public Service Announcement

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Just in case you haven’t heard, even by 2025’s standards there was a pretty massive fuck-up by somebody this week, with billions-with-a-b of passwords leaked.(*) And it’s looking like a lot of them were from Apple and Google and Facebook, and places like that where you really want to make sure your password is secure. I changed about twenty passwords today– all of my email addresses except for work, anything connected with money, and this site– and while it was a pretty big pain in the ass, it really needed to be done.

You’re using a password manager, by the way, right? You should be using a password manager. Make your password for that a four-or five-word phrase that you’ll remember, substituting a couple of numbers for letters or maybe doing some strategic misspelling, and let the app worry about everything else.

Anyway, point is, go do that.

Dammit, I had something else for this. Uh … shit, getting old sucks; I’m watching a video on another monitor while I’m writing this and I’ve lost the ability to pay attention to more than one thing at once. Expect a quick post tomorrow; we’re going to my brother’s to celebrate both of his kids’ birthdays; we’ve had to reschedule this a couple of times now because one or both of them keep getting sick, so hopefully nothing other than the heat will be getting in our way tomorrow.

Gaaaah. If I remember the other thing I’ll either throw up another post or just edit this. There was definitely something but it’s gone right now. Sigh.

(*) I’m not actually certain of any of the details of the leak, which looks like it had to have been multiple simultaneous leaks, somehow? I just know I pay attention whenever Apple or Google gets hit by one of these things because those are the accounts I really don’t need compromised.

EDIT: Oh! I remembered! I woke up this morning to discover that I had a couple hundred page views already, which is not normal– usually there will be no more than a couple dozen overnight. The other weird thing? They were all from Hong Kong, and the specific posts that were seeing a bunch of views were all older posts with no clear relationship to one another. We’ll see if it happens tonight. Those couple hundred page views were also spread out over a hundred or so individual visitors, so it’s not like one person went through a big chunk of the site or something. So … yeah, Hong Kong folks, if you come back, can you tell me why? 🙂

Literacy was a mistake

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I just witnessed someone asserting, with no apparent irony, that Abraham Lincoln had non-violent alternatives available to him to end the Civil War. I mean, if I want to be charitable for some misbegotten fucking reason I suppose he didn’t actually append “and win” to the word “end,” but Christ and fuck, how does just existing keep getting dumber?

Yesterday I had another, different human explain to me with no small amount of exasperation that just because I had lived through the thing he was talking about, a thing that happened before he was born, it didn’t mean I knew anything about it. Not even “knew more than he did”! Knew anything at all.

The older I get, the more I want to roll all technology back to somewhere between 1998 and 2005. Actually, hell, I can give you a date: let’s say back to November 6, 2000 and just erase every single Goddamned thing that’s happened since then and start over again. That was when the world went off the fucking rails, right?

This is a metaphor, somehow, for something

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

So my car’s in the shop. It’s been intermittently reluctant to start; I haven’t been stranded anywhere yet but my wife drove me to work a couple of days last week and it’s been clear that something needs fixed before it gets worse.

Today we dropped the car off and I picked up a rental. It’s a black Toyota Rav4; perhaps not exactly the model being pictured up there, but close enough.

I absolutely could not get the radio to work. I sat in the parking lot of the rental place for a few minutes trying to make music happen, and when it didn’t, rather than going inside and asking about it or, like, reporting it as a potential defect, I just drove home, intermittently fiddling with the audio settings at stoplights and when it didn’t seem likely to immediately cause me to crash.

I got into my driveway, still sans music, and realized I’d forgotten to get the garage clicker from my car before dropping it off. I sent my wife a text to open the garage door and, hey, come meet me in the driveway too; I have a weird problem.

Then I fiddled for another couple of minutes, cut the engine and went to check the mail.

By the time I got back to the car my wife was outside.

“This is the weirdest thing,” I said. “I can’t get the radio to work.” I’d been able to play music from my phone, but still no radio.

I started the car and the radio came on immediately. Naturally, it was … startlingly loud.

The end.

Internet’s out…

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

… and I’m not about to try and write something substantive on my phone. Go listen to some good music and I’ll see you tomorrow.