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As Peter Thiel ditches Silicon Valley for LA, locals tout 'conservative renaissance'

If the billionaire tech investor and noted libertarian Peter Thiel really does leave Silicon Valley for Los Angeles to escape what he views as an increasing intolerance for conservatives, the city’s growing community of conservatives will be there to welcome him.

Among LA’s right-leaning residents are the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, the political commentator Dave Rubin and the blogger Bill Whittle. There’s also the former members of the defunct Friends of Abe, a secretive group of Hollywood conservatives that fractured in 2016 over the candidacy of Donald Trump.

“Silicon Valley has long despised the American right and it’s beginning to flex its muscles against us,” said Michael Knowles, an LA-based podcaster for The Daily Wire, referring to a lawsuit filed by conservative media site PragerU against YouTube for allegedly “censoring” conservative videos.

“It’s a sign of the time that Peter Thiel is heading down here because there’s been a conservative renaissance in Los Angeles,” Knowles said.

PragerU’s chief marketing officer, Craig Strazzeri, added: “It’s both astounding and sad – but unfortunately not surprising – that there are parts of this country where you are socially and professionally shunned if you support the duly elected president of our country. That might be changing in Los Angeles.”

Previously: Peter Thiel Migrating From Silicon Valley to Los Angeles

I wouldn't cheat on anyone. Never have never will.

On Valentine's Day I bought a rose for a woman I'm interested in. She clearly likes me but I really don't know whether she would want to date me.

She wasn't in that evening. I felt a huge sense of relief.

Last night I was stricken with terror because she was in. I said "happy Day After Valentine's Day" then gave her the rose.

I don't think I have ever in my life seen someone as happy as she was last night.

Neither of us had anything rational to say so I left.

But soon I'm going to ask her to meet for coffee. In my experience that works quite a lot better than asking women to dinner.

Never ever take a first date to the movies. Fail to heed this hard-won advice and she'll spend the duration of the flick wondering if you're going to put your arm around her, while at the same time you'll be wondering if you can get away with doing so.

When you feel confident enough to take her to a movie, and she's not going to get pissed off at you for putting your arm around her, take her to a comedy.

I once took a first date to "Lorenza's Oil". It's a true story: Lorenzo had a horrible genetic disease that resulted in constant, excruciating pain. That disease only happens to boys. The women in his mother's side of the family tend to all have red hair.

It was ultimately a truly wonderful story, but when Lorenzo first started screaming in pain I wanted to crawl under my seat.

What the movie portrays by the end of the movie is quite inspiring. So by then I was OK to crawl back out from under my seat. I'll leave what actually happened as an exercise for the gentle Torrent enthusiast.

What was I thinking?

I should not write code when I'm hallucinating.

The playboy who got away with $242m – using ‘black magic’

Air Dabia

A: It was a bunch of skiing enthusiasts who went to Tahoe without bringing the car chargers for their iPhones.

This joke is my own original work. I'm going to milk it for all it's worth.

You Up? College in the Age of Tinder

Frankly, dating apps can also just make things incredibly awkward. My freshman year I swiped through hundreds of people. At one of the last tailgates of the year, a random man walked by me and yelled: “Hey! We matched on Tinder! You are Tinder girl!”

I was mortified. Suddenly everyone around me knew that I was on Tinder. And I had swiped through so many people, I had no idea who this guy was. He was just another nameless “match” that I would never get to know. Because, needless to say, I walked away and never spoke to that guy again.

[...] The same Snap asking to “hang out” sent at 2 p.m. can have a completely different meaning when sent at 2 a.m.

[...] You don’t want to be mid-makeout while the jewel-encrusted crab from “Moana” is singing about how shiny he is.

So, most people know I've been using Linux since mid-2004, and that I started with Gentoo...which, yes, is the equivalent of learning to swim by donning a bacon bikini, rubbing yourself in A1 Steak Sauce, and jumping in the Amazon in the middle of piranha season.

Over the last 13+ years, Linux has...changed. A lot. I am sorry to say that I don't believe most of the changes have been good ones: GTK 3.x, the fiasco that was the KDE 4 series, RedHat aiming to become the next Microsoft, and the crux of the former, SystemD. Yes, I am a SystemD hater, and I make no apologies for it. It does things wrong, it does not even pretend to follow the Unix philosophy, and its syntax and "feel" remind me more than anything of PowerShell, which has to be the most bloated, flabby, weak, user-hostile CLI environment in history.

I also don't have a lot of money for hardware; this post is being typed on a used Thinkpad T440s I was lucky enough to acquire for $200 on EBay from a trusted source. And, being that i work 55+ hours a week *and* do anti-human-trafficking stuff, I don't have endless time to piddle around with Gentoo any longer. Much as I love the near-insane levels of control and configurability it offers, my poor ULV mobile i5 CPU just can't take that level of abuse for long.

So...I'd been distro-hopping for a while, playing with Devuan, Slackware, Artix, Obarun (unsuccessfully; the fucker just wouldn't install and I have no idea why), even FreeBSD.

And then a friend from college, the one who got me into Linux all those years ago, suggested Void.

Now, I'd heard of Void before, but had never even visited the homepage. Doing so left me somewhat underwhelmed, but intrigued; it was very businesslike. There wasn't the patronizing aura of the *buntu family, the slightly notionally-cabbage-smelling, half-baked feeling around Debian, or the complete unprofessionalism of umpteen hojillion other flavor-of-the-week distros.

If anything, it felt like FreeBSD, which I had limited success with and mostly enjoyed, but which didn't let me do a few things I really had gotten used to on Linux. So with Matt's encouragement, I downloaded the Xfce installer, backed up my stuff, cleared out my HDD, and booted it up.

It was a revelation. I don't know how else to describe this. Aside from the slightly WTF choice of using CFDisk, the installer was a no-nonsense NCurses-based affair that reminded me in all the good ways of the Slackware and FreeBSD bootstrappers. It was one of the most painless and ye-gods-FAST installs I had ever seen. Rebooting worked immediately; I was presented with a vanilla Xfce desktop and a very minimal set of programs, which is how I like it.

Two things immediately stood out: the first is the package manager, the XBPS suite (xbps-* commands). I can't say enough good about this; it's like Arch's Pacman for adults. it feels like the lovechild of Apt and Pacman in all the best ways, and it is *blazing* quick. It also has an xbps-src build system, which is to xbps something like the *BSD ports tree is to FreeBSD's pkg utility. It even acts a lot like the ports tree.

The second, and the thing that has made me a Void fangirl for life, is the Runit init system.

OpenRC isn't bad, and I'll take just about anything over Gawdawful SystemD, but Runit feels like alien technology. It is incredibly fast, it's very simple to administrate--just symlink stuff from /etc/sv to /var/services--and it will even, something like the Minix reincarnation server for its drivers, automagically restart crashed services for you!

Did I mention fast? Because this thing goes from "pushing Enter on the GRUB prompt" to "SDDM login screen ready for my credentials" in 10 seconds. 10. I counted. 9-and-a-bit, actually, but close enough to 10 to say 10.

If you run Linux, if you *love* Linux, try Void. You won't regret it. It will change the way you think about Linux. It sweeps away all the bad decisions of the last half a decade. Stuff Just Works. It's the most stable Linux I have ever used, and this despite being nearly as bleeding-edge as Arch. Runit is the star of the show and I wish it were standard on every distro. Do it. You won't b disappointed. Enter The Void.

Meet the Writer the New York Times Hired and Fired In Just Six Hours

After a Twitter Storm, The Times and a New Hire Part Ways

- a method." -- Caltech mathematician Tom Apostol

        sleep( 10 ); // MDC try to fix fast user switching with a horrible hack

I’m a 29-Year-Old Pregnant Virgin

"This is me giving a middle finger to the people who told me I couldn’t do it because I’m not married yet."