admiralteal

You mean Half Life: Full Dive, followed by Half Life: Full Dive 2. The second in a trilogy never to be finished.

I, for one, could not be made to care one iota about what Jack Dorsey has to say. He’s a weird little fuck, and only getting weirder.

Time long past to be a lot more honest about these tech billionaires – pretty much every one of was just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success compared to any other mid-level software developer was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandiose delusion.

Google loves to have entirely ai-driven moderation which makes decisions that are impossible to appeal. They are certain that one AI team lead is more valuable than 20 customer service agents. Meanwhile, YouTube shorts is still a pipeline to Nazidom and death by electrical fire.

Might be the worst customer service in the tech industry, though that’s a highly competitive title.

They also don’t offer replacement parts (even major parts like the charging case) for their headphones. So I guess they’re intended to be a disposable product. Evil shit.

If you’ve ever had an entirely positive interaction with Google customer service… you’d probably be the first.

The user above is just one of those guys who looks at anything the dems do and thinks, look at this bitch eating crackers.

Nothing good can ever be celebrated or praised. It has to always be bad.

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Also known as a SASSS

They are very useful for outlining and similar “where do I start” writing projects. They help break the dam and just get some damn words on the screen, at which point it’s often easy to continue and flesh things out to a complete thought.

The analogy isn’t quite right, though.

In this case, you are leaving the state (digitally) and going to a market where the goods are not restricted. The vendor is then packaging them up the same way they always do, and you’re bringing them back home with you. You can’t even really claim they’re “shipping” the goods. YOU provided all the shipping labels and all that, they just dropped it in the mailbox dutifully, like they do everything else.

…then the AG is suing the bodega you bought them from for not checking that you were from a state where it was restricted.

It seems to me if anyone should be getting sued, it’s either the ISP or the consumer. Both of which are politically infeasible; the first draws intense net neutrality implications on top of being an imposition among his homies and cronies in the ISPs and the latter would be unenforceable under current technological and legal paradigms.

Long term, we should ABSOLUTELY expect these christofascist lunatics to push us towards our own Great Firewall though. That’s definitely the endgame. They want total control over morality backed by the clenched fist of the state.

Every non-NATO state on the border will be targeted and incorporated either directly or by being turned into a loyal authoritarian state a la Belarus.

And if the US leaves NATO, that undermines confidence in NATO. The alliance will fall. At that point, either the EU will have to step in and supplant it – in which case the US will no longer be even be PART of the mightiest diplomatic alliance in the world, much less influential in it – or else there’s no reason to think Russian aggression will stop endlessly escalating until all-out war between nuclear powers is on the table.

Man, I keep getting this incredibly Mandela-effect like feeling that this entire Vegas tunnel project was something I made up.

Glad to see news that it wasn’t. The idea is just so colossally and obviously stupid compared to actual transit investment that it really FEELS like something a lefty type would’ve made up as a hypothetical to illuminate the kind of idiotic shit happens in American urban planning.

Highly recommend Volts to everyone interested.

David Roberts is EXTREMELY practical, politically. He’s very no-nonsense, but gives clear and simple reasons for why he categorizes stuff as nonsense when he does. He’s not some techno-wizard optimist, but he’s also clear about how much tech we DO have and how much is achievable on realistic timelines if we just commit. He’s also clear about what the obstacles are, and even sometimes gives useful calls to action.

His most recent episode on nuclear is an almost perfect example of this. A lot of people are VERY enthusiastic about nuclear. He had Jigar Shah from the DOE on to talk about the field extensively – the upsides and downsides, what technologies work and make sense, what technologies are just mis-advertised, what technologies are total vaporware, why it’s so hard to build nuclear in the US (hint: it’s not the anti-nuke environmental lobby), and all that. Fabulous interview.

I definitely trend towards doomerism on all this stuff, but it’s good to be reminder the tech really is there decarbonize a LOT and VERY FAST, and probably even achieve planetary net zero or even net negative within my lifetime. Just have to convince people the juice is worth the squeeze – which it undeniably is when the entire ecosystem is at stake.

Sounds to me like there is a total glut of software engineers.

Which makes it really difficult to fathom why they are paid so goddamn much.

The most charitable read is that it’s an attempt to build hype among powerusers by letting them own a piece of it.

In a vacuum, that’s actually kind of nice.

A less charitable reading is that they’re targeting the users who have flukes and blowholes to try and get even more money from them as part of a media campaign to make it seem like they truly value those users.

There’s just zero merit to these “people on the internet are saying X” stories.

Nothing of value to sourcing a few retweets, ticktock duets, instagram stories, or whatever the fuck TMTMTM version of it you get.

Actual street interviews with random schlubs are far, far more informative than this crap. The internet is huge and you can find literally any opinions on it. Sourcing these anecdotes is absolutely the trashiest tier of journalism and anyone writing one of these stories should think hard about an immediate career change.

Run a fucking poll if you want to write a story about public opinion.

The world will be a better place the day after every serious news media organization leaves twitter and tells all their journalists they cannot use it as anything other than an original source to what a specific public figure has to say.

You have fundamentally misunderstood the interoperability that is being discussed re: podcasts and drawn a totally spurious conclusion.

You can connect to nearly any podcast using as little as an RSS reader. You can build your own podcast app TOMORROW and that app will be able to access pretty much any podcast from any network (with very narrow exceptions for the worst actors, e.g. Spotify exclusives, NPR One, etc).

The only purpose of the various platforms is boosting discovery. There’s nothing oligarchic happening there; for pretty much all of them listing your podcast is free. There’s also absolutely no necessity to use any particular platform’s discovery tools or to list your podcast on any platform. It’s totally fine to distribute it yourself, via a link, using whatever means pleases you. Your “podcast discovery platform” could well be your local bookclub’s email list – and while the quality of that discovery may be worse, it in no way inherently limits what you can access. Even if you use that platform’s app, it should still generally be possible to add any podcast via RSS URL (if any major apps don’t support this, they’re behaving in a deviant way).

There is absolutely nothing oligarchic in general. At least for now, so long as the fucking fuck fucks at Spotify don’t get their way.

Spotify is actively and aggressively trying to be the ones to break podcasts by having their spotify exclusives.

Even things like Patreon bonus episodes aren’t a problem – they still are sent out via RSS. Still use the interoperable standard. You can even share the URL with people you know, if you feel like it.

The bad actors creating true app-exclusive content need to be called out, shamed, and stopped. Even if it is NPR.

Analog cameras also do not catch an image exactly as-is. Most likely, the idea of a “true” image of exactly how a thing exists in the real world is just a fantasy. This is qualia. An image is definitionally subjective. Just look at the history of film technology and the racial biases it helped perserve.

But there’s undeniably a huge difference between how you interpret and commit the photons going through the lens versus entirely inventing photons going through the lens.

I had some French cousins we would talk to a little bit at the time, and I remember their descriptions of the early internet were just absolutely bizarre in comparison with the minitels.

In those days, I’m sure every major region and country had vastly different experiences.

But yeah, at least my experience in the US was that AIM was huge. My entire peer group was connected through AIM. That and memorized land line phone numbers.

God, I remember in the early-ish days explaining what browsers were to AOL users.

It honestly felt pretty early in AOL days that people were mostly just using it for email, chatrooms, and otherwise as a web browser on the regular, non-AOL internet. Then AIM becoming more popular as time went on, but eventually third-party clients totally obviated that in a lesson Google would learn from well (and their takeaway was to destroy Jabber/XMPP with great prejudice before they lose control over their users).

Explaining parents that all they needed to do was open another browser – literally any other browser – while AOL was running and they could go to the websites with it was rough. “AOL has you connected to the internet already, you don’t need to use it to go to infoseek.com” or whatever.

Whenever they finally did it it seemed like magic. WOW, how does this connect to AOL! Then they’d close AOL and disconnect the modem and tell me the other browser was broken.

I remember all my friends convincing me to switch to Opera because it had tabs and that was revolutionary.

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