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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
you know how Atari called the Jaguar as a "64bit system", because it had two 32bit CPUs? (or because it had a 64bit bus, but let's not worry about that)
we should apply that logic to the current generation of consoles.
So the Switch is a 256bit console. It's the Nintendo 256.

The Xbox Series X? terrible name.
Better call it the "Xbox 512 Blu-ray".
like the Jaguar CD, the Sega CD... the good old days when consoles had their media type in the name.

Boringly the PS5 is also a Playstation 512 Blu-ray, because both of them are using the same AMD Zen 2 CPU.

The Switch one is weeeird. It's built on an Nvidia Tegra X1, which is an 8 core 64-bit CPU, so that should be 512, right?

Well... no. Four of them can't be used. And later documentation doesn't even mention them.

it's some weird system where the system-on-a-chip has four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores but only the A57s are usable?
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are?
OK, so there's a physical problem with our eyes: We move them in short fast bursts called "saccades", right? very quick, synchronized movements.
The only problem is: they go all blurry and useless during this

having your vision turn into a blurry mess every time you move your eyes is obviously not a good idea, so our brains hide it from us. Now, imagine you're an engineer and you have this problem.

You've got some obvious solutions you could do.
1. make the vision go black during movement. (Some VR games do this!)
2. just keep showing the last thing we saw prior to movement

both are good options with different downsides, but OH NO. this is assuming everything makes sense and is chronological and (regular) logical.
Your brain does neither of these options, really.

first, it basically puts your visual system on "pause". You're not seeing blackness or even nothing, you're just not seeing period.
then when you finish your saccade, it shows you what you now see at the new position. and then it pretends it can time travel.
ALL
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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
argh chrome updated and it seems they've intentionally broken custom search engines. I have had a keyword search for "foone" which searches my own twitter, so I just type "foone BLAH" and it gives me a twitter search for when I said BLAH, right?


but now I get that option in the titlebar of "search twitter self-search" which is the name of the search"
if I just type "foone blah" now...

it ignores the search I have had defined for years and just googles it.


and this is definitely on purpose because they didn't just break it, they changed it. it's now "fooneblah"


there doesn't seem to be an option to make this stop and get the old behavior back :(
TECH

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Adrian Yalland
Adrian Yalland
@AdrianYalland
A statement about Stephanie Hayden.

In January I became aware that Ms Hayden (who monitors this account despite being blocked) had made a series of defamatory allegations about myself and my wife.

The allegations were made on Twitter, via Hayden’s account, and were widely retweeted.

The allegations were that as a result of her making a police complaint, (1) the police were seeking to urgently speak to me.

Furthermore (2) that police has spoken to me on 26/12/20 and offered some kind of “robust” advice about my conduct on and off line.

Finally (3) that police attended my home address in November, where my wife mislead them as to my whereabouts.

Hayden commented about this at length on Twitter, said that both and I am my wife had lied, and that I had even given a false address in Hampshire.

I said at the time all the allegations were false.

The police “complaint” was nothing more than Hayden making yet another vexatious complaint to the police, as Hayden routinely does.

The police did not speak to me on 26/12/20, as alleged, or at all.
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jeevan patwa
jeevan patwa
@jeevanpatwa
#SuvenLife – Niche R&D play..very high risk and very high reward…key is right allocation…

Jazz Pharma was quoting around $0.5 in 2009, today its $150 and Mcap of $8.5 Bn on Nasdaq..almost 300x in 11 years. 80% of its total sales ($2.1 Bn) come from single drug Xyrem.

Axovant Lifescience, bought Alzheimer molecule from GSK, repackaged it and done phase-3 trials. Before starting the trials, the valuation was $2 Bn, just before announcing the data, it rose to $3 Bn. One of the leading broker put the target of $12 Bn if the trials succeeded..

but it failed in phase-3 trials. Current Mcap is $120 Mn…

This is R&D for New Chemical Entity (NCE)…very high risk and very high reward…

Brain-related illnesses, also known as CNS diseases, afflict more than 2 billion people worldwide. Diseases of the brain and mind range

from Alzheimer’s, dementia, epilepsy, migraine, multiple sclerosis, neuro infections, Parkinson’s, psychosis, schizophrenia and stroke to brain injuries and various mental disorders. The global market or CNS therapeutics is projected to reach $137.7 billion by 2025.

#SuvenLife has 1 lead molecule SUVN-G3031 in phase-2 trials which is similar to Xyrem but superior features, 3 molecules completed phase-1 trials and starting phase-2 trials and 11 molecules in pre-clinical trials. All are related to CNS which is growing and uncluttered market
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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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Tad Strange
Tad Strange
@bread157
@DawgLaser @GravelInstitute Rush Hudson Limbaugh III (/ˈlɪmbɔː/ LIM-baw; January 12, 1951 – February 17, 2021) was an American radio personality, conservative political commentator, author, and television show host.
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Scott Hechinger
Scott Hechinger
@ScottHech
Every single public defender. Every single day.


Bail arguments, motions, oral arguments, hearings. Judges don’t know, follow, or care about the law. Prosecutors are willing to take advantage of it. And mandatory minimums, withheld evidence, & pretrial detention coerces people to plead before trial. When theres a jury. A shot.

But defenders still fight. And still win. Most times wins aren’t “Justice.” It’s power of repetition of argument in front of same judges. Introducing those in power to the people they oppress. Not just a RAP sheet or words on a page. Defenders make it harder to be brutal & cruel.

I worked as a public defender at an office as well resourced as any in the country. Social workers, team of investigators, a reentry team, support staff, specialist attorneys in immigration, housing, education, family. Relatively low caseloads (80-100). And yet still injustice.

Most think that balancing the scales of justice means more funding for defenders. Thats part of it. Enough a attorneys to actually be at bail hearings. Wrap around services to be able to help people trapped in the system end up better off in their communities. Lower caseloads.
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Anu Satheesh \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3
Anu Satheesh 🇮🇳...
@AnuSatheesh5
Stories of Guruvayurappan
Shri Krishna Leela

This is a beautiful story of Guruvayurappan. Once there lived in Guruvayur a poor family. Kitta, his wife & kids were struggling for their daily needs. With only a coconut tree in house, he earned a living by selling coconuts.


Kitta was from a low caste family. He was a great devotee of Guruvayurappan. Everyday before going to work he always prayed infront of a picture of Guruvayurappan in his house. His only wish was to worship at Guruvayur & have annadanam in temple. But he was not allowed there


It was Utsavam time in Guruvayur. From far behind kitta and family worshipped Guruvayurappan. Annadanam was given daily and no one was left empty stomach. Only Kitta didn't receive. That night, it was only Kitta's family who was sleeping without food. After temple nada closed


Shri Krishna, dressed himself as a Brahmin went to temple Kitchen. He packed food and went directly to kitta's house. Reaching Kitta's house, Shri Krishna told he was sent by a cook of Guruvayur temple and gave them the food he packed. Kitta and family was very happy seeing food.


When Kitta finished his food, Brahmin asked it will be better if he get a tender coconut( karikku)to drink. Kitta climbed the tree and gave all coconuts to him. After having 1 tender coconut, the Brahmin asked to bring remaining coconuts to Guruvayur temple the next day.
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Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
1/OK, I should really write another thread about university-centric regional development, because I think people often make some (very understandable) mistakes when thinking about this issue.

2/The biggest myth, I think, is that universities help regions by educating locals as undergraduates.

Skeptics of universities say: "But most of the people who graduate end up leaving."

3/In fact, most of what a university does for a regional economy is NOT about educating local kids.

Educating local kids is good for the nation, but doesn't help a region much.

The way a university helps a region is through

4/Undergraduates usually leave town after graduation.

But university RESEARCH pulls in OTHER smart people from other regions, and they stay there.

Here's a paper showing that this is the main way universities increase a region's human capital:

5/Research also pulls in business investment.

Companies want to partner with university labs, so they can commercialize the technologies the labs produce. So they invest in the labs, and sometimes they even put their offices in the town.
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History Of Rajputana
History Of Rajputana
@KshatriyaItihas
**Thread on Bravery of Sikhs**
(I am forced to do this due to continuous hounding of Sikh Extremists since yesterday)

Rani Jindan Kaur, wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh had illegitimate relations with Lal Singh (PM of Ranjit Singh). Along with Lal Singh, she attacked Jammu, burnt - https://t.co/EfjAq59AyI


Hindu villages of Jasrota, caused rebellion in Jammu, attacked Kishtwar.

Ancestors of Raja Ranjit Singh, The Sansi Tribe used to give daughters as concubines to Jahangir.


The Ludhiana Political Agency (Later NW Fronties Prov) was formed by less than 4000 British soldiers who advanced from Delhi and reached Ludhiana, receiving submissions of all sikh chiefs along the way. The submission of the troops of Raja of Lahore (Ranjit Singh) at Ambala.

Dabistan a contemporary book on Sikh History tells us that Guru Hargobind broke Naina devi Idol Same source describes Guru Hargobind serving a eunuch
YarKhan. (ref was proudly shared by a sikh on twitter)
Gobind Singh followed Bahadur Shah to Deccan to fight for him.


In Zafarnama, Guru Gobind Singh states that the reason he was in conflict with the Hill Rajas was that while they were worshiping idols, while he was an idol-breaker.

And idiot Hindus place him along Maharana, Prithviraj and Shivaji as saviours of Dharma.
HISTORY
Andrey \uf8ff Azimov
Andrey  Azimov
@AndreyAzimov
The best way to know if people like your product is NOT:

- Have a lot of emails in the waiting list
- Become #1 on PH
- Become #1 of HN or Reddit
- Have people that saing "I'll pay"
- Have a lot of free users

The best way to know if they're actually pay for it.

The only thing that matters is your product providing a value, and you can't know this until people will pay money for it.

We can have a first signal of a product/market fit after the launch by check how many sales we've got in the first 24h. Some scale:

200+ This has a high potential.
100+: This has a potential.
50+: Some people need it.
10+: People almost don't need it.
0+: People don't need it.

This is for a single time payment product. For a subscription probably it should be less because people hate subscription.

And obviously, you should have a lot of traffic like 3-5k+.

Here is a stat for my products (macOS apps) for the first 24h after the launch:
STARTUPS
Rich Energy
Rich Energy
@rich_energy
Great seeing one of the fastest natural drivers of the last decade Robert Kubica today with @WilliamsRacing at @COTA #USGP #f1 #robertkubica #Poland #richenergy
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