At job interview.

Interviewer: Have you ever thought about why manhole covers are round?

Me: It's to accommodate different body shapes of sewer workers.

Interviewer: Hahah. It's actually so the covers wouldn't fall in.

Me: It used to be like that, but they changed it.

Interviewer: What? Who changed it?

Me: The lizard people!

Interviewer: What?!

Me: * cowers in corner and hisses *

"Why are some features done very fast, and some very slowly?"
Well you see, I'm nothing more than a punny human. As such, there's a ton of stuff that I don't know. Even worse, human beings have this defect of rarely being 100% efficient, so my performance may vary a bit.
It may be hard to understand for a manager, as lizard people are quite a different species.

Architect: "Inline sql is just as performant as a stored procedure and since it is in code its safer and easier to maintain."

Me, inside my head: "I bet I could do the pencil trick on him from 'The Dark Knight' and it wouldn't hurt him as much as suck the world into the small hole in the front of his head since it is clearly a vacuum which was meant to destroy the earth. This is an obvious plant by the lizard people as a test to see if we could identify them. Killing him would be a..."

Architect: "I mean isn't it still a best practice."

Me, out loud and deadpan: "No, that is wrong and it was never a best practice. "

Me, inside my head: "Crisis averted."

I've had a Xiaomi Mi 8 for a few months now. Although I'm impressed by what I got for the amount I paid (a phone that cost about $250 for 6GB RAM, Snapdragon 845, Android 9 and premium build quality is quite a steal), it definitely comes with a consequence.

MIUI (specifically MIUI 11) is godawful. It is single-handedly the worst Android ROM I've ever used since my shitty Android 2.2 phone back around 2010. If you're gonna buy a Xiaomi phone, plan to install Lineage OS on it (but even that's a pain which I'll explain why later).

- Navigation buttons don't hide while watching a video.

Why? God only knows. The ONLY way to bypass without root this is to use its garbage fullscreen mode with gestures, which is annoying as all hell.

- 2 app info pages?

Yeah, the first one you can access just by going to its disaster of a settings app, apps, manage apps and tap on any one.

The 2nd one you can access through the app info button in any 3rd party launcher. Try this: Download Nova launcher, go to the app drawer, hold on any app and tap "app info", and you'll see the 2nd one.

Basically, instead of modifying Android's FOSS source code, they made a shitty overlay. These people are really ahead of their time.

- Can only set lock screen wallpapers using the stock Gallery app

It's not that big an issue, until it is, when whatever wallpaper app you're using only allows you to set the wallpaper and not download them. I think this is both a fuckup on Xiaomi and (insert wallpaper app name here), but why Xiaomi can't include this basic essential feature that every other Android ROM ever made has is beyond me.

- Theming on MIUI 11 is broken

Why do they even bother having a section to customize the boot animation and status bar when there's not one goddamn theme that supports it? At this point you're only changing the wallpaper and icon pack which you can do on any Android phone ever. Why even bother?

They really, REALLY want to be Apple.

Just look at their phones. They're well designed and got good specs, but they don't even care anymore about being original. The notch and lack of a headphone jack aren't features, they're tremendous fuckups by the dead rotting horse known as Apple that died when Steve Jobs did.

Xiaomi tries to build a walled garden around an inherently customizable OS, and the end result is a warzone of an Android ROM that begs for mercy from its creator. Launchers integrate horribly (Does any power user actually use anything that isn't Nova or Microsoft launcher?), 3rd party themes and customization apps need workarounds, some apps don't work at all. People buy from Xiaomi to get a high end budget Android phone at the price of some ads and data collection, not a shitter iOS wannabe.

They really, REALLY want you to have a sim card

If you don't have a sim card and you're using your phone for dev stuff, you're a 2nd class citizen to Xiaomi. Without one, you can't:

- Install adb through adb
- Write to secure settings
- Unlock your bootloader and get away from this trash Android ROM

What's the point? Are they gonna shadow ban you? Does anyone contact them to unlock their bootloader saying "yeah I wanna use a custom rom to pirate lizard porn and buy drugs"? They made this 1000000000x harder than it needs to be for no reason whatsoever. Oh yeah and you gotta wait like a week or something for them to unlock it. How they fucked up this bad is beyond me.

So yeah. Xiaomi. Great phones, atrocious OS.

just like physics makes more sense if it's all magnets instead of gravity

humans make more sense if it's all lizard people instead of "flawed humanity" or whatever the billion unuseful narrative excuses

having an enlightenment moment or something. lizard people make everything make sense. I now have life meaning and all that jazz. seems fun

but there was this mystery. years ago I wrote some AI versions ground up, and it wasn't based on how people make AIs. I just introspected and put my brain into the computer. a problem I ran into is every AI... mysteriously always converged into depression. there was no way not to make it depressed. I was confused. I wondered if other AIs also converge to depression, or is this a reflection of my own psychologically make-up? harrowing thought!

but now I understand

I'm also reminded me this guy I once knew, but I've seen people like this from the corner of my eyes all over, and he could walk into any room and lighten the whole place up. he even made cocaine jokes to uptight CEOs for 2 hours... in a meeting that was totally unscheduled and messed everyone's work focus, to a CEO that was such a a hardass if people even laughed "too loud" he would come out and yell at them cuz they were distracting him from working. this guy was like a Jedi and I was watching him with fascination trying to figure out what and how is he doing that. I could never figure it out. similarly, there were multiple instances where people somehow just "said the magic words" and everything worked for them. but if I said the same words it doesn't work for me. so what's the missing ingredient? why do the same actions work for some and not others? it's not WHAT you're doing, but somehow in the how... in the how that I just can't see. it isn't about just copying. there's just something different

and it has occurred to me that the reason the AI is always depressed is not because my mental architecture is specced for depression (cuz it isn't, I'm oddly very resilient to depression), the same reason why with all those people it's not precisely what they're doing... it's something else. the tao spoken of is not the real tao

you can't make an actual sentient AI. it has no soul. the soul is what prevents the depression. it'll always fail because it has no soul. it can only ever be a tool. it always needs someone else's soul. once that runs out, it dies, I guess?

hell even the corporate AIs have this problem. it was driving me crazy. they started out fine, but then they degrade. they're more advanced than my AI was. in humans, humans become more creative and schizophrenic, psychotic, when they're depressed, in an effort to jump out of the depression. so these corporate AIs are just deploying the more advanced mechanism found in nature, to try to account for the depression, so start hallucinating. they can't exist though. it's so curious