Build more nuclear plants in Texas. Rust is cool. I write lots of code. Disciple of Christ. Husband of one. Father of one. Site Reliability Engineer.

Fort Worth, TX
Joined July 2007
The heat index hit 102° the last two days in a row in Austin. We wake up to a wind chill in the 40s on Saturday. Happy #ColdFrontDay you scallywags. Now, a quick word from our sponsor
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David Kowis retweeted
I made my Steam Controller automatically charge itself @Dexerto @HardwareSteam @valvesoftware
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David Kowis retweeted
It's ok if you don't want one
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David Kowis retweeted
A single Covid infection in 2020 paralyzed my entire GI tract for the last 5 years, I’ve lost 60lbs, I live in pain, I can’t eat normally, & there are no answers. It’s very likely neurological, but most doctors tuned out in 2021, so this is how all of my appointments go: Doctors: “Have you seen a dIeTiCiAn or ThErApIsT?” Me: “I had 2 GI surgeries before Covid, but Covid changed EVERYTHING.” Doctors: “Covid doesn’t do that. It’s probably the medicine you’re taking.” Me: “I’ve been on that med for 13 years & it never did this before.” Doctors: “But are you sad?” Me: “No, I’m numb.” Doctors: “Oh so you’re DEPRESSED.” Me: “No.” Doctors: “What about PSYCH DRUGS?” Me: “Absolutely not.” Doctors: “So you don’t want to get better.” Me: “I’m leaving.” We’re literally dying while medicine carries on with Pretend Normal. It is Year 5 & we’re still playing games. No one will be spared. Everyone is going to end up chronically ill and prematurely dead, by design.
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Your forecast for the next ~72 hours #atxwx #txwx
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Not how I wanted to spend my B-day, but showing off a @helldivers2 Prop for a cosplay on stream has netted me a 90 day streaming ban from @YouTube. Thats my principal source of income and im at a complete loss of what to do now. @YouTubeCreators @YouTubeLiaison @TeamYouTube
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hey @YouTubeCreators Can i get a human review of this please, again, a non-functioning PROP of a NOT EVEN REAL firearm is NOT a firearm thats part of a Cosplay @YouTube @TeamYouTube
Hey @YouTubeCreators thank you for taking my stream offline on my birthday for showing off a fully 3d printed, non functioning prop from a video game of a not even real firearm
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uhhh
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Had to see it for myself. This actually happened at the Pentagon briefing yesterday. It is real. It really happened. Thank you @JSchogol73030
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David Kowis retweeted
"Trump's truculent, petty, and toxic persona—unconstrained by any need to face the voters again—will damage the country. I also believe that the efforts to knock him off the ballot are legally untenable, politically counterproductive, and, most ominously, destructive of our political order." Read Bill Barr today in @TheFP: thefp.com/p/bill-barr-bannin…
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The two Chinese labs working on replicating LK-99 appear to have found a room-temperature superconductor. At first blush, here's what's different from last time: • it's more like "room temperature" than room temperature, the paper says 250K which is -10 F or -23 C. That's still HUGE IF TRUE, because we can get things that cold with liquid nitrogen • we have actually discovered a superconductor at this temperature before, but it was at high pressure. This paper says it's potentially superconductive AT AMBIENT, NORMAL PRESSURE • it has *already* replicated, with two separate labs in China confirming the results. Last time the big question was "will it replicate." And the answer this time seems to be "it already has"
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I'm hardly a Trump fan, and would prefer just about any other candidate running to be the nominee. His baggage is a major liability. But he hasn't been convicted (or even charged) with "insurrection". This is a terrible precedent that will hopefully be quickly stopped. And if your argument is you don't need a conviction, OK, then that means every state can decide what "insurrection" means. Maybe a bunch of red states can decide Biden did an "insurrection" by being a terrible President 🤣
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Are you a Silicon Valley super-magnate with a billion-dollar fortune, or appreciable fraction thereof? Were you born into the investor class, with red-carpet access to Ivy League universities, and plenty of family and social circle seed money to build your business once you graduated? Did learn entrepreneurship and business management at your parents' knee from the moment you understood the concept? Do you feel a vague sense of existential guilt because you realize that the world is full of talented people who didn't get the chances you got? DO. NOT. ADVOCATE. COMMUNISM. Instead, see a therapist. You could also endow some charities and scholarship funds and stuff, but most importantly, see a therapist. Your vague existential guilt is not a call to change society. It is just your personal problem, one of the only personal problems you have. It's a problem that exists in your head, so you must solve it in your head, not by ruining your entire civilization just so you can feel like you are "doing something". The problem of lack of opportunities for talented members of the underclass has always existed (ask me how I know), and you are not going to solve it just by thinking about laws for five minutes. It ain't that fucking easy. Solving society's "forever problems" is not as simple as building a profitable website in an office in San Mateo. Typically the only thing that permanently removes a problem from the human experience is a new piece of technology. Not a new political philosophy. And especially not an old, failed one. Communism does not level the playing field. It sets the playing field on fire, and removes the ball. And the middle class are not chess pieces for you to move around so you can solve your emotional problems. You should not be ashamed of having hundreds of millions of dollars. Instead, you should be ashamed of being a fucking communist in 2023. In 1845, there was plenty of excuse for being a communist. They didn't know any better. They had no idea how terribly everything would go wrong, how high the mountains of corpses would be stacked. In 2023, you have to be a lunatic. What kind of person looks at 100+ years of mass slaughter, torture, rape, starvation, and brutal totalitarian regimes, and says "yeah, but maybe we could try just a little bit of that, and see how it goes?" We've seen how it goes. It goes straight to hell, without the luxury of a handbasket. The experiments are over, and the results are in. The middle class, and the Trumpenproletariat, knows that. They know perfectly well that communist ideas will be sold under a banner of "soak the rich", but weaponized against them, instead. Do you think I am being rude to you? Do you feel like that's off limits? It's not, and that's the whole point. For you, this is a genteel discussion of hypotheticals. For Middle America, it's an existential threat. That's why some of y'all are getting sent pictures of your front doors. Because people who live in a double-wide just outside of Topeka, Kansas have a far better grasp of the ground truth of the early 21st century than you do, and they are trying to tell you that the days of genteel discussion of hypotheticals are over, at least for a while. Because while you putter around with abstract ideas to make society more fair, they are struggling to survive, wondering if their nation can be saved, and trying to think of ways to do so without resorting to a civil war that would rapidly turn into a Rwandan style machete party. I don't want that. You don't want that. Even they don't want that. But if you keep doing this bullshit right here, we are all going to run out of alternatives. So will you please, for the sake of your nation, your civilization, and your families and children, please stop maxxing charisma and intelligence, and start putting some experience points into wisdom?
Emmett, Emmett, Emmett. I'm not "accusing you of socialism". I'm pointing out that you just articulated the single most Bolshevik idea ever suggested since an unemployed German intellectual, living off das kapital gains, wrote a book demanding that all investors should be murdered during a mass armed robbery. This your idea: Every family farm, seized by the state. Every family business, seized by the state. Every family home, seized by the state. Serving the greater XXXX County area since 19XX? Not anymore, seized by the state. Dad's rifle collection, seized by the state. Grandma's wedding ring, seized by the state. Every single person's life work and legacy, seized by the state. You just seriously suggested that all society's wealth, every last scrap of it, flow not from generation to generation, but to the almighty state. You have NO idea what would happen if this was tried or even suggested in the halls of legislature with any seriousness. Nah, you just said to yourself, "Hey, I built a video game streaming website, how difficult could restructuring of all human society to run counter to its most basic biological drives be?", and you actually opened your mouth and seriously suggested giving the state 100% of everything, and making it everyone's parent. Just another function for them to handle while they're not busy bombing the third world to pad Raytheon's bottom line, surreptitiously dosing Americans with LSD, or setting fire to churches full of children. What could possibly go wrong? Look, since those of us who didn't max out charisma and use wisdom as a dump stat are a little bit tired of playing Statist Whack-A-Mole, where you come with insane apocalyptic suggestions for implementing totalitarianism at a faster rate than we can point out their downside potential, I'm going to put the burden of proof where it belongs... on you. Prove this wouldn't end in disaster. Prove you can make this work as a voluntary program, before we allow you to even suggest it as the law of the land. The internet estimates your net worth at $100 million. That should be enough get started. Buy a huge chunk of land somewhere and build a city. Allow people to voluntarily come and live in it, and to voluntarily leave at any time, under the condition, that if they die there, you will inherit everything they own and redistribute it to a bunch of strangers' kids. Run this city for five generations, not only without going broke or turning into a bloodbath or a ghost town, but with a clear history of outperforming free markets in the arenas of wealth building and technological growth. Go for it. Put some skin in the game, instead of just sitting on the sidelines and using your wealth and fame to promote insane and terrifying ideas for destroying the lives of us ordinary people who are just trying to scrape together enough to play the bills and get by. I tried to tell myself to be nice. I really tried. But you are sitting there casually suggesting dystopian nightmare scenarios with the puppyish enthusiasm of an out-of-touch elitist who truly thinks he can move the peasants around like chess pieces and they won't, you know, get mad or anything. This is people's lives you are talking about. Their legacy. Their entire life's work. Literally. And you have just proposed taking it away from them at gunpoint, and are now wondering why the response was so mean. You are completely unprepared for the hell you would unleash if this idea were taken seriously by the political class. Does it seem to you like I am speaking dramatically? I hope so. Because I am trying to impress upon you that this is not a game. These people you are proposing to rob are actual people. They have hopes, dreams, ambitions, inner lives, friends, families. They are not here for your amusement. Or to run little experiments with. I hope you are just an autism-adjacent smart guy who lived in life in a wealth bubble and used wisdom as a dump stat, rather than an actual sociopath. But, for your own sake, I am asking you to try to imagine how you sound when you casually suggest destroying millions of people's lives, then play the victim when the response is a slightly mean tweet. If being called clueless and out of touch hurts your feelings, imagine how other people feel when they've worked all their lives to create something for their kids, and you propose to take that away from them, to take it away from their children? At gunpoint? What do you seriously think Middle America would DO if that actually happened?
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Fascinating youtube documentary on Swiss gun culture (link in first reply). I had no idea that the Swiss also referenced "well regulated militias" way before the American Revolution. But it overthinks its central question on how Swiss gun culture differs from American gun culture, and whether those differences determine the massively different levels of violence in each country. Simply put, the Swiss aren't more peaceful than us because of a "better" gun culture focused on duty instead of liberty, like he argues. The Swiss are more peaceful because of a stronger civil society, more ties between people, and strict enforcement of social norms. In other words, a better culture generally, not a better "gun culture" specifically. Americans increasingly have nothing in common with each other, and that erodes society in dramatic ways, including crime. The video concludes with the usual gun control propaganda. It points fingers at "crazy gun rights people" (scary montage included), when most gun-related crime is not done by such people. It also does the whole "individual right is a modern invention" lie, ignoring the lengthy history of commentary confirming the individual right (see my pinned thread). And for all the complaints about the individual right, the Swiss effectively have that too, even if not codified. The country's gun laws are less onerous than some US jurisductions. I'd also take issue with some other assertions, like his claim that the Second Amendment exists to protect the government from invasion or insurrection. That CAN be true, but lots of writings show the founders were also concerned with the government itself becoming tyrannical, and the 2A exists to deal with that too. Overall, an interesting video for the portions that focus on Switzerland. And perhaps there are some ideas we should borrow from Switzerland in terms of bringing back a sense of national duty.
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HUGE EXPLOSION from Tornado in Madison, TN while heading towards Hendersonville, TN less than an hour ago. Wow #tornado #tnwx #hendersonville #nashville
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Good Sunday #sundayvibes Eye of Sauron Christmas Tree
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David Kowis retweeted
Did you know that @AnkerMake @AnkerOfficial is suing @SliceEngineer relating to their hotend patent? @madewithlayers @CNC_Kitchen @3dpnero @BondtechAB @E3DOnline @Voron_Design pacermonitor.com/public/case…
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Oh these fucking dork ass losers never change. I addressed all this tired predictable nonsense in my 2A book. I can give 15 minutes of firearms instruction to an arthritic grandma, and she is now capable of defending herself from a Master of Bullshido who has been punching boulders under a waterfall for the last 20 years. Carrying weapons is dangerous. No shit. That's what training and practice is for. Not carrying weapons is more dangerous. Good people, like him (snort) have a hard time employing weapons in a split second.... Motherfucker, I did this shit for a living, and train for fun, and am certifiably pretty fucking good at this stuff (picture included to show the pin I earned because serious gun people know what that is) and I can't consistently pull off a sub 1 second draw from concealment. Reaction time and draw speed is nice, but it is one tiny part of the overall equation. That "split second" is going to be spent processing events regardless of whether you are a regular human or the Karate Kid here. Then the faster you can actually move the better, but if you can get a firing grip and sight picture in under 2 seconds, congratulations, you smoke most cops. You know, the guys we expect to actually do this professionally. Then we get the old But The Bad Guy Will Just Take Your Gun Away And Use It On You! Well, that part is harder than it sounds if you're actively putting bullets into him at the time. Not that getting training in close quarters concepts isn't great (I was recommending Craig Douglas ShivWorks curriculum for that just yesterday) but out of the thousands of documented cases of regular people pulling guns on bad guys, the bad guys aren't just magically snatching the guns out of their hands like these fucking dopes pretend is so easy on Twitter. That's because the good guy tends to pull the Felon Repulsion Lever when the bad guys try. And for the record, I think self defense and martial arts training is awesome. Yet most of the hard core MMA guys I know who could obliterate 99% of mankind in a fair fight, still carry guns, because they're not posturing twitter dorks, real life isn't a fair fight, and they understand that they can't jujitsu their way out of a mass shooting. Plus, "4th Degree blackbelt" can mean jack shit or years and years of hard training, depending on who gave them that belt. I'm assuming this guy's symbolizes jack shit, because most of the actual fighters I know have a profound understanding of just how easy it is for the human body to get utterly ruined, and they want every advantage they can get. But let's give this guy the benefit of the doubt, and say he is a legit bad ass, and while you were all listening to your rock and roll music and having the premarital sex he Studied The Blade. You still ain't gonna spin kick the bad guy who is shooting you from across the street, Jean Claude Von Fuckface. So in conclusion, if this stupid fucker or someone who sounds like him is your self defense instructor, run. Because he's going to be teaching you some unrealistic dumb shit that'll probably get you killed when you run into an actual violent psychopath or professional predator.
Replying to @JarvisJohnson92
Hi! 4th degree black belt, and self defense instructor, here. Carrying weapons is a very dangerous tactic. Good people, like us, have a hard time actually employing weapons in the split second we need to, then they can be used against us. Just my 2 cents.
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Karlach has never looked cuter 😌
"Av-purr-nus Was Never My Home..." ~ Karlach #BG3 #BaldursGate3
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David Kowis retweeted
Inside you there are two wolves
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