Oh, I know, I first had a bit of a whiff of him being weird when I read The Dilbert Principle. Otherwise a fairly amusing book, but the chapter on female coworkers was… uh, to put it in modern parlance, fedoraèd. This was supposed to be a funny book. Wasn’t laughing.

No no no. PHB is Elon Musk, 100%. (Doesn’t know shit about anything and is dumber than a bag of rocks, but is still very enthusiastic about going forth and fucking things up.) Trump is like the CEO of Dilbert’s company (a lot dumber than the PHB, but fortunately too stupid to function most of the time, so his direct subordinates have to do the actual day-to-day fuck-ups, leaving only the most gigantic massive fuck-ups for him to handle personally).

Edit: And of course it comes as no surprise that when Adams went into the deep end, he worked to “rehabilitate” PHB and other dumb manager characters and made them look better. He was no man of principle, you see.

Soooooo… which is going to ultimately turn out to be more effective way of detecting guns: AI systems, or dowsing? Both are gonna suck, be wholly inadequate for the purpose, and be giant wastes of public money - but obviously, but I’ve gonna admit, AI at least as mild possibility of being better than random chance. In optimal conditions. Maybe.

(You may be thinking “pfffft, surely people wouldn’t be stupid enough use dowsing rods to detect weapons, that’s just so clearly stupid”, but they did, and this “solution” was sold to them by slick conmen. …Sounds familiarrrr???)

Part of me wants to go “well you’re on a public venue, what the hell did you expect?”

But anyone wearing Zuck Glasses should be shot at from the orbit from the EU Anti-Douchebaggotry Satellite, or something. That’s a special exception to public photography laws that I approve of!

Hey. Hey hey hey HEY.

That’s not fair to us.

Random Linux nerds who were bullied. BULLIED, I say. When we coded our personal sites on Netscape on Linux (which was painful enough when Netscape 4 had a hazy understanding of CSS1/2 already) and the site had some random glitches on IE from time when we couldn’t ensure IE compatibility.

This “IE6” shit needs to stay buried, OK? This is “history that must never repeat” shit, OK? OK. Good.

BONUS JOKE:

There was a whole range of jokes dedicated to what happens when you shoot yourself on foot with your favourite programming language.

My favourite was this:

“You shoot yourself in the foot with JavaScript.
If using Netscape, your arm falls off.
If using MSIE, your head explodes.”

“Congratulations, you won million dollars! But first, we’ll, of course, have to deduct the cost of the AI credits you used in this challenge…”

It’s hard to believe only a few years ago, we had this concept known as “parody horizon”. People used to say super wacky shit and you had to use your brain power to figure out if they were Beyond the Parody Horizon. Are they saying hilariously stupid shit for sarcasm points, or are they saying weird shit that is just telling?

Unfortunately, the horizon is dead. These people are just… too gone. They can say stupidly telling shit from time to time, but what the hell are we supposed to do about that? Nothing’s gonna work.

Some of our local fast food chains don’t even give us cardboard straws anymore. Just drink from the sad cup. With a Sad Turtle warning label on it. [EU single use plastic label]

It just gives the public a pause to think. To plot for the revolution.

Me, I’m beyond that, I usually can’t afford fast food, most parts of the month I buy potatoes from the local store.

For those wondering about a serious answer, TC was Transfer Control (in most modern ISAs it’s called JMP/JUMP) and TCF was Transfer Control to a Subroutine (equivalent to JSR/CALL).

Ah I see. These mushrooms have [hbomberguy] extruded [/hbomberguy].

GOTOPOOH was actually jargon for Program 00 (Hex), which was (I think?) the AGC’s normal idle routine.

BURNBABY was an alias for BURN_BABY_BURN which was the lunar descent burn sequence. Or something. I wouldn’t have named it that.

I don’t think Philips makes televisions or other consumer electronics any more, so I assume it’s been ported on smart light bulbs or medical equipment.

I’m thinking buying physical media is great and shopping for physical media is so much more interesting.

Using physical media is a hassle, I much prefer to rip the contents, then convert the stuff as necessary.

…Books are an exception. I just recently rediscovered that reading isn’t annoying actually, because you don’t have weird technical and DRM issues with physical books and you can keep reading the pages for hours and hours. My tablet sucks, but physical books don’t keep freezing!

I think Debian needs at least 64 megabytes of memory to boot? Or at least Debian-Installer needs that for its ramdisk? (I remember doing some convoluted jank to get Debian crammed on a machine with 32 megs of memory once.)

Dunno how factual this is, I haven’t checked in a while

SCART is the most glorious analog video connector ever devised. No one can convince me otherwise. When I was a kid, it really put this idea in my head that we can actually do some pretty damn neat shit here in Europe. 🇪🇺

My only interaction with DisplayPort was this:

[bought a new monitor]
Oooh, this one has two HDMI inputs and a DisplayPort input. I’ll probably just need the HDMI inputs, but whatever.

[got my late father’s PC and decided to install Debian on it]
So wait, this doesn’t do HDMI, it just has VGA output. The only VGA monitor I have at hand kinda sucks. Oh, wait, what the heck is that? Is that a DisplayPort? Where did I put the cable?

(Yeah, the PC works great, only problem is that it defaults to VGA output and will only switch to DP after several seconds, which means I never see the rad GRUB screen. So far, mostly used this PC to rip my CD collection to FLAC, because it has a DVD drive.)

Or just use MIME (e.g. =20). Guaranteed to make someone say “okay, how the hell did that happen?”

(It’s also trendy because badly cleaned up MIME garbage is in the Epstein files!)

Happy World Turtle Day, everybody! 🐢🌍

Many seemingly invincible businesses empires have collapsed on some beautiful ordinary day when people just said “you know, we can’t pay for this, this is not the price we can pay - we would want to keep doing this, but the price clearly outweighs any benefits to us”.

…Nnnot that I want to defend the Soviet Union, but their propaganda poster artists did stuff just like this, except they didn’t put absolutely cursed piping things in the illustrations, and this despite the fact the artists were probably hella drunk or something.