blivet

Palm Pilots seemed so futuristic back then.

I’m grateful to this strip because reading it caused me to learn the correct spelling of “abstruse”. I’ve never heard anyone say the word, and for some reason I had always read it as “abtruse”, without the first S.

Yeah, 10 or 15 years ago I read an article about how Google brings up new storage modules when they need to expand, and their modules are essentially shipping containers full of hard drives.

It’s really hard to fathom how Google’s decision makers don’t understand that in addition to being confusing, their failure to settle on one messaging app makes them look stupid and flaky in the eyes of average users. This isn’t some niche app for specialists that Google can get away with killing because the user base is relatively small. The general public uses instant messaging all day every day, and after having Google pull the football away two or three times, they’re just going to decide to use something that’s going to stick around instead.

I agree with you that high karma doesn’t indicate anything besides popularity, but someone with negative karma is almost certainly either a troll or a political extremist of some sort. I do find it useful to know when I would be better off not engaging with people like that.

Individual users having some sort of reputation is useful. I always thought it was handy on Reddit to be able to distinguish people I happened to disagree with from actual trolls. The latter always had pretty high negative karma scores, and it was good to know that there was no point in engaging with them.

Life always finds a way.

Are you sure? Even if it’s true, I like the life forms we’ve got right now an awful lot, and they don’t deserve what we’re doing to them.

“The planet,” in terms of a rock orbiting the Sun, sure, but we are killing an awful lot of flora and fauna that would be doing fine if we weren’t around to fuck things up.

If I remember correctly, another reason was so that bots wouldn’t get usable feedback from voting.

How do you identify a bot account?

Since Musk is doing such a good job of ruining Twitter, Zuckerberg might be exploring the idea of a Twitter-like Meta product.

At my old job the director of my department had a poster up that said “move fast and break things”, but he also demanded 99.9999% uptime.

When I was a kid 10% was the standard. I don’t know of any other profession whose pay has doubled in real terms during my lifetime. As far as I’m concerned, if 15% isn’t enough, too damn bad.

I wish the micropayments model people were proposing twenty years ago had taken off. I don’t have any interest in subscribing to The New York Times, for example, because I just don’t read it very much, but I wouldn’t object to paying a few cents every time I happened to read one of their articles.

Yeah, some of my favorite subs would often go for days or even weeks without a new post.

The rice isn’t raw, just cold.

I know what you mean. There’s nothing wrong with being young, of course, but I really cut back on my interaction on Reddit when I realized a while back just how many people there are teenagers or in their early twenties.

Even if they’re not actually trolling, there’s an awful lot of attitude motivated by ignorance. It got really frustrating being downvoted for simply explaining some actual verifiable fact about the early development of JavaScript.