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yesterday: somewhat viral post about shooting billionaires into the sun (and my stupid "WELL ACTUALLY" reply)
also yesterday: elon musk leaves twitter "for a while" and jeff bezos steps down

COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT!

 elon's gotta be off twitter for a while because they don't have wifi on the SunCrasher 9000, and bezos keeps stealing his phone anyway
elon thought he wouldn't need it because of starlink but THE SATELLITES ARE IN LOW EARTH ORBIT, MUSK, AND YOU'RE HEADED TOWARDS THE SUN
bill gates is the only one who still has internet access because he remembered to set up a long enough ethernet cable

(although tim cook joked that was just because his WinPhone doesn't have wifi support anyway)
zuckerberg asked if bill gates would let him use the network connection for a while and while billy g was fine with it, it turns out none of the other billionaires brought phones with built in ethernet ports

finally, the win95 phone comes up top!
BTW I have repeatedly made fun of the windows phone in a couple posts recently and I think people might mistake it for actually being serious mockery.
it's not that I think the windows phone is behind iphone and android and that's why I mock it for being 16-color or dial-up or having a full size ethernet port or running windows 95
it's that I wish that all those things were true so I could buy one
anyway, google founders page & brin brought along a server but it turns out the hard drive was damaged on lift off so they have a blank drive. they're gonna need to write new code for it, and where are they gonna find developers 20 million miles towards the sun?
then steve ballmer comes around the corner, chanting
the harddrive was partially encrypted, and gates wrote some BASIC code to unlock it but eric schmidt estimated it'd take too long to decode it. There's only 18 months left in their trip to the sun, and their computer would need to be twice as fast to solve it
that's when Gordon Moore (net worth 9.8 billion) walked in
larry ellison slipped a note to musk saying he figured out a way to get to mars, and to meet him down on the cargo deck.
elongate sneaks down there and there's no database dude to be seen, but there's two people...
"Who are you, what do you do?"
"Hi! I'm John"
"Jacqueline, nice to meet you. We make candy!"
it takes elon a second but he finally gets it, and swears revenge on larry ellison
BTW, amusing thing about John there. The first picture that shows up on forbe's "top billionaires 2020" page and on google images is this one:
while trying to find a better picture of him (or a picture of him with his sister Jacqueline, which apparently doesn't exist) I found that it's a cropped version... and they cropped out THE FUCKING QUEEN
you know you're rich when the first picture of you on google is a picture where they had to crop out someone who rules (well, reigns) over 16 countries.
gonna finally change my profile picture/avatar (I'm too old to use the acronym "pfp") once I can get a picture where I'm talking to the pope, and then crop his holiness out
anyway, to finish connecting some of the billionaires together:
michael dell provided the server that the google trio are using, although it was purchased used off alibaba (thanks Jack Ma)
on the trip they're mainly eating chocolate since giovanni ferrero at least brought plenty of nutella.

bloomberg supposedly had organized purchasing all the food but thanks to a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue, he just ensured that warren buffet was on the ship
lee kun-hee keeps making "suck my koch" jokes to tim cook and then elbowing charles but rupert murdoch explains it's pronounced like "coke"
They did have some entertainment on the trip, at least.
George Lucas brought his VHS tapes and that fortnite guy Tim Sweeny brought a DOS laptop with a copy of ZZT loaded onto it
unfortunately steven spielberg is the only one who brought a VCR and he hasn't talked to Lucas since '81, so all they can really do is look at the VHS covers
gabe newell did bring a top of the line gaming PC, but he forgot to enable offline mode before they left so he can't get any of his steam games to load
my favorite thing about this forbes billionaire list is when you get to someone who has their (money) "source" listed as just "cheese"
ahh, there must be a bug there, it's loading the wrong name. lemme fix it real quick... yeah.
it must get confusing because they'd got Eric Schmidt (former google CEO) and Eric Smidt (CEO of Harbor Freight) on the same spaceship
that wasn't the only name confusion by far.
One of the Waltons went up to the founder of the Allegis talent agency and told him how much they loved his work, and he had meekly to explain that he wasn't THAT Jim Davis.
forbes why did you have to put an advert in between these two billionaires
does peter thiel get weaker the closer they get to the sun?

and we all know what he spent his cargo allowance on: a coffin filled with the earth from his home country.
although that brings up a vampire mythology question:
if you're a vampire who needs to sleep on earth from your home country, what if the country you were born in no longer exists?
Peter Thiel was born in West Germany.
Now you can argue that yes, modern Germany is just the continuation of West Germany, because legally it is, but what if he was from East Germany, or, like, Czechoslovakia?
maybe it needs to be dirt that was collected back when that country still exists.
So he's got to find some dirt from prior to german unification
Ted Turner did actually get to take along a set of DVDs and a DVD player but sadly only a B&W TV so he's refusing to watch anything on principle.
I like how the profile for Steve Case doesn't even mention AMERICA ONLINE which is the only reason most geeks even know who he is
(and yes, it's That Steve Case. He's a billionaire!)
oh hey, they've got a kryptonian on board!
Don't they know that he will only be powered up by earth's yellow sun?
anyway, yesterday's billionaires post was this:
https://t.co/n5Uc1rJupS
and my WELL ACTUALLY response was here:
https://t.co/I9sBHHnO5N
with the key take-away being this:
https://t.co/X0UjRaDMlm
besides, clearly I'm suggesting with this thread that we make a reality TV show where billionaires are loaded into a spaceship and we watch them
if we vote one of them out the airlock every week, the show can run for 40 years according to the Forbes 2020 list.
although I'm still wondering on the vampire thing
even if we assume that countries don't matter and you just need it from the general sort of area you were born in, what if that area isn't really there anymore? like, what if it is underwater?
if you dredge up the silt from the bottom of a man-made lake or swim down and dig up some dirt from what used to be an island before the sea levels rose, does it still count as "earth from your home country"?
maybe this is why we never see any atlantis vampires.
they just can't get the dirt
maybe global warming is a long-term plot by the werewolves to finally win the war
a couple centuries from now there's gonna be a bunch of werewolves living on top of mt. everest, drinking tropical cocktails with their yeti friends.

the last vampire is dead. the galaxy is finally at peace.
if a werewolf bites a yeti, do they turn into a werewolf on the full moon?
would they even notice?
"yeah, doc, about once a month I get slightly hairier and feel like howling at the moon. Weird, right?"
maybe it'd work backwards because of how werewolves are on the other side of the hairy-hominid spectrum.

every full moon, the wereyeti shrinks and loses their hair, becoming a human guy named gary
all the wereyeti become a guy named gary.

it's one of the great mysteries of cryptozoology
once every thousand years one will be born who turns into someone named garry or garrison but they are always sterile, and their mutation can't be passed down
anyway your challenge, fiction writers, is to figure out a way that the lack of a "home soil" country is actually a power-up for vampires.
like maybe they can only be truly killed by burying them in their home country?
so if you kill an american vampire, that's easy mode.
go dig a hole in charlotte, NC and stuff them in there, and they're never coming back
west german vampires? slightly trickier, but you just need to make sure it's on a part of modern germany that was west germany.
then you've got vampires from like, Kashmir, and that's way more complicated.
and burying a vampire from a now-underwater island is very tricky. you need lead weights (although silver is preferred for obvious reasons, although that can attract treasure-hunters who might unbury them) to hold down the coffin under the ocean/lake/whatever
and the ultimate threats are vampires from, like, Atlantis or Lemuria or the land of Mu.
They're underwater AND you don't know where the fuck to dig!

More from foone

foone
foone
@Foone
maybe it's just leftover urges from being a toddler putting round pegs in square holes but every time I see a video card like this on ebay I want to buy it and also some RAM chips to fill it with


when I win the lottery I'm gonna buy all of these and a bunch of RAM chips, put them together, and then relist them right back onto ebay


I have a dream that one day all the super VGA cards on ebay will have full ram expansion sockets


that's a nice VLB video card you have there
be a real shame if someone were to UPGRADE ITS RAM


huh, I don't think I've ever seen RAM in that package
QFP DRAMs?
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
I went looking for a remote-controlled power switch (the wireless christmas kind, not the modern IoT kind) and didn't find it, but I did find this thing I bought just to figure out why it exists.
It's a timer outlet, but you program it from your phone... but it's not wireless.


Yeah instead it plugs into your phone's HEADPHONE PORT


I got it on sale.
probably because iphone dropped the headphone port and they had to get with the 21st century and make it bluetooth


So inside the box is the device. it's got a little 2-prong polarized outlet with no ground.


on top is the only controls: on/off/timer.
TECH
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foone
foone
@Foone
So I was talking to @gewt about Job: A Comedy of Justice and I came up with a theory that I think explains why Heinlein's late-period work is so kinda-terrible and why I still enjoy it so much


So Heinlein had always been very interesting in the short parts of his novels, like the little snippets inside chapters. He had a very fun writing style, and wrote some fun dialogue with fun characters, right?>
It probably comes from how much of his early stuff was short fiction

And I think what happened with a lot of his longer works is that he'd just start writing fun bits and hope it would end up going somewhere or having a bigger plot by the end. like eventually he'd figure out where this was going, then go back and rewrite it into a cohesive whole

and I'm sure he had editors that'd help this process. No editor would let you publish something as rambly and changing-gears-every-other-chapter as The Number Of The Beast, for example... unless you were God-King Of Science Fiction 1980s Robert Heinlein.

so basically I think what happened is that by the 80s (when he was in his seventies!!) he lost the drive to go back and rewrite and he was too Untouchable for editors to make him.
CULTURE
foone
foone
@Foone
A fun fact on the wikipedia page for the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor:
it is the most frequently manufactured device in history, and the total number manufactured from 1960-2018 is 13 sextillion.

That's 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.


Though this picture is a bit misleading.

Even with devices this small, we couldn't make 13 sextillion of them in 60 years.

So imagine a chip like this. It's the 555 timer, which is one of the most popular integrated circuits ever made.

In 2017, it was estimated a billion are made every year.


And at the heart of it is the die, which looks like this:
(from Ken Shirriff's blog)
https://t.co/mz5PQDjYqF


And that's fundamentally a bunch of CMOS transistors (along with some diodes and resistors), which are a type of MOSFET. How many of them are on a 555?

about 25. Not many, but it's a very simple chip.
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
I'm watching these videos about the Georgia Phone Call and they're talking about if Dominion did any kind of weird hacks, and all I'm thinking is:

I need to get a voting machine.

Yeah, it turns out if you select the party vote option and toggle it Democrat-Republican-Democrat then tap the Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen three times, you'll trigger the Easter egg and you can play DOOM!

Set your location to California, vote no on Prop 22, party vote democrats and select the Green presidential campaign Howie Hawkins, then toggle Prop 22 to yes, then longpress "reset ballot" and you'll get rickrolled.

This is how my brain works. "the voting machines could be hacked! The president might be trying to steal the election! What should I do?

Oh yeah, get a screwdriver and make a voting machine play DOS games."

I wonder if they're still x86 based? The last time we had a big electronic voting scandal, of the they were... But now we're in the arm era.
POLITICS

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Mau Abata \U0001314a
Mau Abata 𓅊
@MauAbata
Read through a forum thread on Chastity Mansion to see who is talking about the Edge-o-Matic and figure out what more to address regarding frequent questions, as well as scout out user feedback. Here's some thoughts you can carry back to the forums!

My website doesn't have any product reviews, but people scatter them everywhere else in forums, tweets, xtube vids, etc.

If you ARE a previous customer, and you like the thing, can you drop a review on my site to help others?

The price is steep, but that's the amount of coins I calculated to make these. I have several spreadsheets calculating every expense involved with this project.

The current cost sustains production and development of new tech, and is helping create jobs. We are 2 people now!!

It IS 3D printed, because injection molding is orders of magnitude more expensive for the initial tooling, and I am still making small revisions to the enclosures.

Injection molded plastics are a six thousand dollar commitment for fifteen cent parts. Great for mass mfg.

Also, if you didn't know, 3D printing technology allows for some shapes which would be difficult, expensive, or impossible on injection molding or milled parts!!

Undercuts, which I use in this design, require special lifters to mold that cost a tremendous fortune.
FOR LATER READ
Defense News Nigeria
Defense News Nigeria
@DefenseNigeria
The people can always be brought to the bidding...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the naysayers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

Hermann Goring

We've seen reports of Yoruba leaders asking President Buhari to stop the war and sack service chiefs immediately as a way of beginning restructuring.Our country is sitting on a keg of gunpowder they claim. Once again partisan hacks want to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

You see, when you are fighting small limited wars there is a natural inclination , on the part of politicians not directly impacted by the war to want to blow things out of proportion. There is a basic disconnection now in this country between the population and the war

....and i find it quite frankly. Frightening. Compared to what was obtainable 2015, the security situation in Nigeria has vastly improved yet the media ..and partisan hacks portray a much more pessimistic narrative.

Consider that in 2015 over 21 Local government areas and 2.6 million Nigerians were cut off from the rest of the country, under the administration of a caliphate in Nigeria for 16 months. A huge chunk of the northeast was no mans country.
FOR LATER READ
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Planet Money on HP's myriad ripoffs; Strength in numbers; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/esjoT3u5Gr

#Pluralistic

1/


On Feb 22, I'm delivering a keynote address for the NISO Plus conference, "The day of the comet: what trustbusting means for digital manipulation."

https://t.co/Z84xicXhGg

2/


Planet Money on HP's myriad ripoffs: Ink-stained wretches of the world, unite!

https://t.co/k5ASdVUrC2

3/


Strength in numbers: The crisis in accounting.

https://t.co/DjfAfHWpNN

4/


#15yrsago Bad Samaritan family won’t return found expensive camera https://t.co/Rn9E5R1gtV

#10yrsago What does Libyan revolution mean for https://t.co/Jz28qHVhrV? https://t.co/dN1e4MxU4r

5/
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Billy Bostickson \U0001f3f4\U0001f441&\U0001f441 \U0001f193
Billy Bostickson 🏴👁&👁 ...
@BillyBostickson
@snip96581187 @Daoyu15 @lab_leak @walkaboutrick @ydeigin @Ayjchan @franciscodeasis @TheSeeker268 @angie_rasmussen Clearly, because as I have been saying for 8 months now, DTRA and DARPA have been using Ecohealth and UC Davis to collect novel pathogens for gain of function work back in the USA. I have documented this in many threads which I will post here just to annoy everyone.

@Daoyu15 @lab_leak @walkaboutrick @ydeigin @Ayjchan @franciscodeasis @TheSeeker268 @angie_rasmussen


@Daoyu15 @lab_leak @walkaboutrick @ydeigin @Ayjchan @franciscodeasis @TheSeeker268 @angie_rasmussen


@Daoyu15 @lab_leak @walkaboutrick @ydeigin @Ayjchan @franciscodeasis @TheSeeker268 @angie_rasmussen


@Daoyu15 @lab_leak @walkaboutrick @ydeigin @Ayjchan @franciscodeasis @TheSeeker268 @angie_rasmussen
ALL , FOR LATER READ
GAVNet
GAVNet
@GAValueNetwork
Daily Bookmarks to GAVNet 02/20/2021
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Zen Black
Zen Black
@z3nblack
1/ Thread: "A Silicon Valley Ponzi Scheme"

Thanks to @chamath for laying this out in Social Capital's 2018 annual letter.

I've always appreciated his outspokenness.

2/ The hardest thing for most startups today is the path to market: first finding product-market fit & a way to reach customers, then building a ruthless machine to acquire, monetize & retain them.

3/ Because of this, when the VC industry invests capital into fast growing startups today, the plurality (if not majority) of invested capital will go into user acquisition and ad spending, for better or worse— usually worse.

4/ Todays massive venture-backed advertising, sales, and user acquisition playbook has morphed into one that champions growth at any cost.

This is creating a big bill that will soon come due...

5/ Ad impressions and click-throughs are bid up to outrageous prices by startups flush with venture money, and prospective users demand more and more subsidized products to gain their initial attention.
TECH , STARTUPS , {TEST FOLDER}
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.
TECH
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Kestrel \u2664 lwj kin
Kestrel ♤ lwj kin
@slutxian
MDZS is laden with buddhist references. As a South Asian person, and history buff, it is so interesting to see how Buddhism, which originated from India, migrated, flourished & changed in the context of China. Here's some research (🙏🏼 @starkjeon for CN insight + citations)

1. LWJ’s sword Bichen ‘is likely an abbreviation for the term 躲避红尘 (duǒ bì hóng chén), which can be translated as such: 躲避: shunning or hiding away from 红尘 (worldly affairs; which is a buddhist teaching.) (https://t.co/zF65W3roJe) (abbrev. TWX)

2. Sandu (三 毒), Jiang Cheng’s sword, refers to the three poisons (triviṣa) in Buddhism; desire (kāma-taṇhā), delusion (bhava-taṇhā) and hatred (vibhava-taṇhā).

These 3 poisons represent the roots of craving (tanha) and are the cause of Dukkha (suffering, pain) and thus result in rebirth.

Interesting that MXTX used this name for one of the characters who suffers, arguably, the worst of these three emotions.

3. The Qian kun purse “乾坤袋 (qián kūn dài) – can be called “Heaven and Earth” Pouch. In Buddhism, Maitreya (मैत्रेय) owns this to store items. It was believed that there was a mythical space inside the bag that could absorb the world.” (TWX)
RELIGION
Loren Brichter
Loren Brichter
@lorenb
So it turns out that Google Chrome was making everything on my computer slow *even when it wasn’t running*, because it installs something called Keystone which is basically malware.

I made a website because this shouldn’t

Wired first reported on how bad Keystone was 11 years ago when they put it into Google Earth (they seem to put it in all their popular

The fact that Keystone hides itself in Activity Monitor is bizarre. (The only sign of it was excessive CPU usage of WindowServer which is a system process).

I don’t know if Google was doing something nefarious with Keystone, or a third party figured out how to (which Wired warned about). But either way, I’m not inclined to give Google-the-organization the benefit of the doubt (despite the many good people who work on Chrome)...

...since it's been a decade+ and this still hasn't been "fixed".

There is no reason for auto-update software to need to do what Chrome/Keystone was doing. It also has a long history of crashing Macs.
TECH
Lu_lu\U0001f498
Lu_lu💘
@luciame16
Some thoughts on episode 54 of #Hercai

If you ever cross the distance and come to me, come with love that blooms in your heart.
~ Şems-i Tebrizi

#Reyyan #Miran #ReyMir #EbruŞahin #AkınAkınözü
#HercaiThoughts


1
I have to make a note before writing about this episode. I was the person (still am) who thinks that bringing back D. was a bad idea. I repeat it that for me the writing of S1 and S2 is like tossed into the bin with that plot evolution, but they had to invent something+
#Hercai

2
+ to be able to continue to prolong the general story after Aslan’s story did not work out. All the suffering of M., all the crying seems for “nothing” for two seasons and we viewers are also kind of fed up in seeing him cry all the time when with the upcoming episodes+
#Hercai

3
+he is justified the most to cry. With her resurrection now the attention shifts back to Miran’s storyline and I don’t know if I like this to be honest. This said, Dilsha is here and we have to deal with her.
#Hercai

4
So, my comments are going to be how I find they wrote her into the story, the details we get to know, the flashbacks we get to see, the way it was filmed and directed, with leaving out if I agree on it or not but describing along the way what I saw.
#Hercai
CULTURE