There’s nothing too serious, just my joie de vivre. The usual occasions to celebrate, such as the Christmas, the New Year’s Eve, my birthday, and the Easter, ceased being festive events for me almost 25 years ago. What is there to celebrate? Death in the family? Getting older myself? Suffering injustice at work? Having lived one more year in which life has shown me that people are increasingly stupid and evil? The world keeps being a worse place, and I keep getting older, but… c’est la fête!

So I really can’t report anything out of the ordinary, just the feeling that this world is absurd, and it doesn’t get any better. Correction: there is absolutely nothing that gets better! NOTHING AT ALL.

This happens to me every year, but it’s definitely getting worse. The feeling that one is trapped in their own life. What’s the purpose of life in this fucked-up world? Could my life have been more failed than that? Of course it could, but how many times have I made a mistake that has changed my life for the worse? Dozens of missed opportunities. Dozens of times when I should have acted with more courage and taken a different path instead of going with the flow. That is, not to count the actual mistakes, but only the lack of action. I was naive to believe that “live and let live” and “progress” are real concepts. They aren’t.

All signs point to 2026 as the worst year in the 21st century so far. Just look at Putin and Trump, the supreme retards who are shitting on us all. Look at the ineptitude of our leaders, be they at the national level or at the EU level. If you’re working in a corporation, there are chances you experience incompetence, stupidity, abuse, and injustice at that level too.

Or maybe you’re so stupid that you enjoy life as it is. You love your huge car, your huge TV, soccer, beer, having sex with someone with big tits and make-up in poorer taste than the biggest whores, vacationing abroad, scrolling through social media, and pretending to live a meaningful life. You’re a worm, but a happy one.

There is a 0.2% to 2% chance that you understand my point. So why am I even writing this?

Beyond the obvious (the war, the generalized corruption, the triumph of the imposture, the general decline of the society, of culture, of science, of the real values) and the less obvious for some (the green and woke dogmas, the absurd tulipmanias that started with the crypto shit, continued with the now defunct NFTs, which used the same blockchain technology, then went on to this AI madness, but also the quantum computing quackery), there are some other everyday aspects that kill me slowly but surely.

No, I can’t list them all, and I shouldn’t even attempt to.

Maybe I’m getting older, because I’m bothered by the way everything became kitschy: the way people are dressed, the way women are heavily and tastelessly made up, the way the cars are increasingly large and increasingly ugly, the fact that the music is mostly unlistenable, and hundreds of similar things.

Getting more technical, I surmise that my initial love of electronics, which was for analog electronics, and of computers in their primitive stages of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, might mean that I’m not truly a technical person. Maybe I’m a dreamer with illusory philosophical beliefs, the most important one being that the truth resides in simplicity.

From Plato and Aristotle to Ockham and Newton, many philosophers valued and favored simplicity. For a practical application of this principle, Tacitus, in his Annals (Book 3, Chapter 27), wrote: “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws” (Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges).

Or maybe I’m a poet, as no philosopher fully embraced my ideas regarding simplicity. The quest for first principles is fundamentally about finding truth through simplicity or, more precisely, finding the simple truths from which all else follows. But this is not what I meant. And Keats was a poet: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Fuck me, nobody ever understands me. Je suis un éternel incompris.

To simpler things now: everything gets more and more complicated just because it can become this way. Everyday objects and devices, cars, software, everything. This is getting out of control; it’s increasing the fragility of our society and might prove to be suicidal in the long run.

But in the long run, we’re all dead, so why do I care?

Because I’m not dead yet. Because it’s pissing me off. Because it’s irrational. And because this overcomplication is making our lives worse.

Let me end by mentioning a couple of things related to the topics I bickered a lot about on my blog lately.

After 30 years of Linux, I’m literally disgusted by the point where it is today. I’ve never seen such a monumental mess, not even in Windows. Life is a long succession of compromises, but to have been left, from all the UNIX-like OSes, with this garbage of a kernel and the abyssal cesspool of distros built around it, that’s surreal. And don’t start me about GNOME.

Windows 11 is another example of something that might lead to the demise of our civilization. How did we allow an entire planet to become captive to such a complete failure of the concept of software? Our civilization is farcically fragile because without the Internet, it would collapse in a couple of days, but what about Windows? It’s like Chernobyl, only it’s everywhere!

I might need to downgrade from Windows 11 IoT 24H2 to Windows 10 IoT LTSC 2021, which is supported through 2032, but what then? I know that everyone should look for individual solutions, as humankind is doomed, but still: will there still be life on Earth in 2032?

I’m not even sure that there will be a single Linux distro to work reasonably well until 2032!

But maybe we’re going to die earlier or from a different reason. Not with Putin’s help, nor with Trump’s. Not because of the climate change, nor because of the Eurocrats. We might be killed by our addiction to AI. No, dear Geoffrey Hinton, AI won’t have killed us. Our use of AI will have killed our brains, our collective intelligence, our knowledge, skills, reasoning, and common sense.

AI should be a tool, but we don’t know how to use it properly. How could we, when 98% of people are mentally retarded, uncultured, amoral, fraudsters, or addicted to TikTok?

And yet, I struggle with my use of AI. It’s part FOMO, part an attempt to find it more useful than it actually is, out of a mechanism that tries to make the absurdity of our times less unthinkable.

Let’s look at my bookmarks and my smartphone apps (not Kiro, Claude Code, Claude Desktop): Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok, Mistral, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, Z.ai, Gemini, Perplexity, Lumo. And these are only a selection from the most popular chatbots! Some versions of their underlying LLMs have more specific uses, notably in coding. There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s wrong is that, as I am writing this, there are 2,334,314 models on Hugging Face! Pure madness.

Lately, every 2nd or 3rd interaction with a chatbot made me want to kill someone. Or, rather, everyone. Simple questions might be answered close to perfection. But I don’t always ask such questions. On the technical side, I often need to seek clarification in threads that have 5, 7, 12, or more follow-up questions. Even simpler questions usually need circumspection and alertness, as hallucinations or simply wrong answers can happen at random. But the worst scenario is when you need to constantly contradict the chatbot, to constantly steer it, to tell it that it’s wrong!

The chatbot would nonchalantly repeat, time and again, “You’re absolutely right to call this out,” “You’re absolutely right to question that,” “You’re absolutely right to push back,” and “You’re absolutely right.” Each time, it would admit that its previous “It’s this and that” statement, expressed with absolute confidence, was wrong. But then, it would come up with another resolute assertion that’s equally wrong! Not once would a chatbot say, “It might be that…” or “Let’s try this…”; they’re always overconfident. Maybe they’re meant to bring people to suicide.

Having had enough of the likes of ChatGPT, Copilot, and Grok, for the time being I decided to settle for the following triad: Claude, Mistral, and Kimi. Until the next time…

Meanwhile, even capitalism is failing us. The way it works, even if the population would not increase (but it does), the only way to avoid mass unemployment and chaos is to have a continuously increasing economic output. What with the technological progress (which, surprisingly, goes hand in hand with social and intellectual regress), this increase is even more necessary. Gone are the dreams of “we’ll work less and enjoy life more” dreamt by the pre-woke socialists!

So we want to produce more, not better, and to consume more but pollute less.

On the other hand, there’s a decrease in the quality of life of those who have not succumbed yet to Idiocracy. In the last ten years, we’ve experienced an accelerated decrease in the choice of the products that can be purchased, accompanied by a decrease in quality.

Dozens of products that I liked are not manufactured anymore. And this didn’t happen to me only.

Food is worse. Clothing is worse. Electronics are worse, but at least they’re supposed to be subject to planned obsolescence. Capitalism needs to sell more, otherwise we’d all be dead, right?

Things are uninvented. Technologies are forgotten. Mainstream brands have the same quality as the crap that can be found on TEMU, Shein, and AliExpress.

This race to the bottom (I like how the French say, “le nivellement par le bas”) takes place in today’s capitalism, not in Stalin’s or in Mao’s absurd societies. And we pretend we’re living in democracies in the West. We’re living in Idiocracy.

Don’t fool yourself. Those good supermarket or department store items that don’t exist anymore cannot be found in Doha. There, you’ll only find la crème de la crème of the corruption, but not quality. Only kitsch, poor taste, and shitheads.

Welcome to the brave new world! Add mass surveillance, stir, and enjoy! Happy 2026!

From 1990/12/30.