Sour indeed. There are some decent observations in there. He correctly notes that the book is dissing Stalinism specifically. Newspeak never became a real problem and superficially similar phenomena don’t mean language is losing its expressive power. And yes, those depictions of working class people have more than a whiff of classism to them.

Then there’s a lot of complaining about leftist infighting. It’s pretty appropriate for this to be hosted on that site. It’s only anti-revisionism if it comes from the Vanguard Party region of Marxism-Leninism, otherwise it’s just sparkling sectarianism.

The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain, for he was convinced that if he did not, he would be killed

Better organized than the POUM, I’ll give it that. “Won out” is an interesting choice of words to describe any republican faction in the Spanish civil war.

And then there’s the cringe. No robots and computer? My stories have robots and computer because it’s impossible for someone to always pay attention to spying a bunch of people. The panopticon doesn’t work, actually, because even if at anytime someone could be watching you, they couldn’t possibly be watching you all the time unless they have robots and computer. Also why isn’t this dystopian society more feminist?

I can do it, I have to email a bunch of stuff today anyway. (Edit: sent.)

You’ve done a really good job of picking your subjects. Each episode so far has managed to push the limits in some direction, whether it’s one or more of the F.A.G. scores, the fame of the main character or some other type of intrigue. I did not expect the jungian clusterfuck of bad penises and breasts episode to be overtaken in sheer WTF value so soon.

sickos dot png

you go to Azure if you’re running Windows or you hate yourself — or both

one will quickly lead to the other

Yes he is. It’s not copyright maximalism to be angry that the enforcement of copyright protects and does not bind large corporations with huge financial backing and binds yet fails to protect artists and other producers of creative work who do not have a net worth of millions, billions or trillions of dollars.

Cantrill’s equivocation between cleanroom implementation of an API and sucking up every piece of code on the internet to be cleanroom-washed by the statistical text regurgitator is not the own he thinks it is. It’s also a really hypocritical look given his previous righteous fury over Oracle re-proprietarizing Sun’s open source work. Actually it’s fine when open source code is turned proprietary, we just pulled it out of this black box that filed the serial numbers off first.

That sounds awesome and right up my alley!

…oh, it’s some financialized gambling racket bullshit thing never the fuck mind

He’s already managed to remain untouched through the tariff farce so I’m not holding my breath.

But even if something crazy does happen, a major financial crisis should not conjure images of the economy running off a cliff and hovering in the air for a few seconds making running motions with its legs before noticing its mistake and promptly falling in the canyon and making a hole shaped perfectly like its spread out silhouette. A financial crisis is a serious matter completely unlike an enormous ACME brand anvil falling down the same hole and a crude white flag of surrender feebly popping out of it.

There’s nothing funny about stock market crashes. S&P 500 falling flat on its face is not a laughing matter. Do you think it’s comical when NASDAQ steps on a banana peel and does a double backflip and there’s drums and cymbals and a horn honks as its nose hits the ground? I think it’s sick to laugh at US dollar getting a grand piano dropped on it and then having its teeth replaced by piano keys which play a little ragtime lick before falling off.

Anyway here’s a statement from the chief of US Federal Reserve considering threats made against him by the US president https://youtu.be/KckGHaBLSn4

Feel free to slap me back to my senses the next time I make the mistake of giving a tiniest bit of respect to anyone right of Rosa Luxemburg

It’s a stupid fucking name alright. I guess it’s a bit like any old scandal being noungate despite the Watergate scandal being named after the building and having nothing to do with water.

How to neither downplay the death of Renee Good nor the uncountable number of people, mostly people of color, who were murdered by near equally fascist police forces without the public outrage her murder finally rightly elicited? I am tired and yet I feel bad to even complain about it because look at this shit.

I think it’s a spin on Y2K. A hypothetical moment when quantum computing will break cryptography much like the year 2000 would have broken the datetime handling on some systems programmed with only the 20th century in mind.

My condolences, that truly sucks :(

slaps roof of episode This bad breast can fit so many bad penises in it.

Oko’s Basilisk

Somewhat interestingly, 194 decibels is the loudest that a sound can be physically sustained in the Earth’s atmosphere. At that point the “bottom” of the pressure wave is a vacuum. Some enormous blast such as a huge meteor impact, a supervolcano eruption or a very large nuclear weapon can exceed that limit but only for the initial pulse.

pointing at the blackletter scripts Look how they massacred my boy!

Thanks for the conversion. Real scanlation enjoyers will understand.

What the fuck would an “AI browser” even be, let alone a modern one. I know what a web browser is, basically a combined HTTP client and HTML renderer. An AI browser is not something that has a commonly understood meaning, so to claim Firefox or anything else will be one without elaboration is just wankery.

I can’t help but do their dirty work for them and try to imagine what the hell an AI browser would be. Maybe you develop a standard protocol for prompting chatbots and a markup format for displaying responses and an AI browser is a client for that? Or maybe you just put an LLM in the search bar so Mozilla’s bullshit machine can give you wrong answers before pressing the return key and having Google’s bullshit machine give you wrong answers. Maybe there’s an about:chatbot page. I think all of these are bad bullshit ideas, but at least they’re ideas and not just “what if we added <latest fad> into <product>”.

AI Browsers. Metaverse fast food. Blockchain sneakers. Gigwork apartments. Cloud toilets. Big Data headphones. AR chairs. Military grade pianos. 3D books. App drugs. Dotcom condoms. Cyberspace bicycles. Wireless jump ropes. Video silverware. WYSIWYG carpets. Transistor fanny packs. Electromechanical ladders. Atomic flooring. Radio saunas. Horseless glue. Steam pens. Water powered masturbation.

I assume some mesolithic asshole said shit like “we are transforming our hunter-gatherer settlement to a ‘cave painting first’ society” and neighboring community leaders gave that guy like a hundred animal skins each for his insight.

Good to know that Orange Website is being considerate of us VT220 users. I knew there was a reason why mine has the amber phosphorus.