It’s such a tragedy that the Earth had to be a sphere. I mean, I know it was inevitable. But come on, universe. A sphere? Really? You had to have known about Gauss’s Theorema Egregium, yet you chose sphere. Now we’re all fighting over who gets to be squished or enlarged and in what directions.

With Prodigy Internet, you get on, you get the information you need, and you go do something with it.

Did they get that burrito from the Upside Down?

My local Microcenter has posters of notable computer pioneers up high in the back where you can see them from anywhere in the store. Each poster has the person’s name as well as a description of something they’re most known for. Bill Gates is there as well as Ken Thompson, Robert Kahn, Robert Metcalfe, Grace Hopper, Richard Stallman, etc. I always thought that was a nice touch. Even though it’s like the nerdiest of all stores, I suspect 90% of customers are probably Windows normies and just need a computer for work or to play games and wouldn’t recognize any of them with the exception of Gates. Even I don’t recognize some of the names, like Kahn (co-invented TCP/IP) and Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet).

Every community on the internet full of computer nerds suffers this problem. It’s not exclusive to here.

Did we all live the same childhood?

It’s sort of remarkable that you can enter at New York Harbor and come out at New Orleans without ever leaving the water or touching the Atlantic.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall in the room at Google where the discussions are being had as to what to label the lake. If I’m to be charitable, I’d assume they’ve renamed it because they’re consistently following an internal rule which says they use geographic names from the GNIS, which was updated by the executive order, and they haven’t yet decided whether they should make an exception in this case. Every nonsensical rename in the GNIS weakens its credibility as an accurate database. I’m sure the debates are interesting. We don’t actually know if this is Google “bending the knee” or sticking with the rename for some other more technical reason.

In that case, hunt down Immortan Joe and pay him to do it. He and his goons have the experience for this sort of thing.

I stopped paying attention halfway through his first term. It was like a TV show you stop watching because you began to understand the formula of an episode.

You’re getting scammed. You should tariff the grocery store. Demand that the total on the bill increase by 50% and that that increase be paid back to you. That should teach 'em.

I wanted to watch Well-Founded Fear (2000) on immigration in the US. As far as I can tell, you can only get it by purchase on Vimeo. $12 to rent. $150 to buy. It’s too obscure to have a torrent.

The thing with piracy is there are always so many duplicates. For every piece of media, there may be a hundred different torrents for it with varying popularity. People might be obtaining Future Boy Conan from a torrent different from the one you’re seeding.

Approve too many, you get fired.

Something you might like: https://bootstrappable.org/

What’s the name of that game in which the player’s task is to approve people crossing the border into or out of the Soviet Union (or was it East Germany?)? Someone needs to do that except you’re a medical director deciding whether to approve or deny someone’s claim.

Edit: I’m thinking of Papers, Please.

Most users don’t care about any of the spying. I’d expect a competitor of similar size to do the same. If there’s any improvement competition could bring, it would be for the creators, giving them a larger slice of the ad revenue that otherwise goes to the owners of the platform. I guess that would mean better quality videos for users. Though, I don’t think allowing anyone to make boatloads of money by getting millions of people to sit around for hours and hours watching videos has been a positive for humanity. Incentivizing creators with more money will just make this worse.

Right. Except you can’t influence the Chinese government. Whereas you can, if you are American, influence the American government (through elections, say). And the American government can, in turn, possibly influence the tech companies. And they do. See: the antitrust enforcement in the Biden administration.

As an American, I can’t say I’d be terribly enthused about using a YouTube competitor based in a foreign country. And China is quite foreign to us as far as countries go. And I use YouTube constantly.

Reading Rainbow was on from 1983 to 2006. 21 seasons. I had no idea.