microtherion

It would probably be more accurate to say that for some time, his politics (opposing the Iraq war & the surveillance state) looked sympathetic to many people. His later embrace of Trump & Putin rather undermined the idea that his politics was based on deep libertarian principles.

But in reality he had already done some fairly vile things by then already, e.g.:

* Defending murderous Neo Nazis (not vile in itself, they need lawyers too) while calling their victims “odious and repugnant”.

* Running escort websites and producing cinematic masterpieces such as “Piss Boys in Love”, both with the involvement of his then-boyfriend and later husband David Miranda, under circumstances that seem rather exploitative of the Brazilians involved.

https://masternotions.com

Though the Hunt brothers made a pretty good run at the Silver market in 1980.

You can also readily find occasional videos of Steve Jobs throwing malfunctioning devices across the stage.

And yet, I have to dig my way through pages upon pages of AI trash sites for many Google queries. Somehow THOSE don’t seem to have a problem getting indexed (Maybe they run a sufficient number of ads?).

I wonder whether a “Ig Nobel Price Winner” sticker would provide marketing benefits for an urinal.

Exactly. It’s a collective action problem — every car dropping off a kid incrementally endangers the kids walking to school, so if there is no enforcement whatsoever, we’d end up with everybody driving, and a situation worse than in US schools (because Swiss schools were largely not constructed with drop off zones in mind, and retrofitting them would be difficult with our land use patterns).

Yes, I’m Swiss and walked to school starting around 5. I was hit by a car (due to bad judgment on my part) on the way back from school at 6, though, so it’s not all roses.

I also pulled one of my sons twice from the same pond around that age, so I would not necessarily be super comfortable trusting them around those attractive nuisances, even though I’m on board with the “let them walk to school” policy. It’s a difficult balancing act.

That might be the most embarrassing implication for OpenAI out of the whole affair: That OpenAI, supposedly one of the vanguards in AI, saw a need to appropriate intellectual property of Apple, supposedly a complete laggard in that field.

That’s 1.1% of ~1.1-1.2B Android phones sold per year. I dont’t know how long the average GrapheneOS user holds on to their device, but if 25% of them per year buy a new phone (rather than upcycling a used one or using their previous phone another year), that would amount to about 1% of Google’s annual sales at best.

Steve Jobs seems to have connected having a vision in the metaphorical way you describe with his youthful experimentation with LSD.

That does not seem to stop people from taking Ayahuasca, which seems to very commonly make people sick.

I’m in the process of learning Sütterlin / Kurrent for genealogical purposes. While Fraktur is easy to learn, Kurrent is just horrible, even though the textbook I used, written in 1995, still declares it a superior handwriting cruelly banned by the Nazis.

Maybe the human profession of the future is some sort of “Shabbos Dev”, providing enough human intervention in the coding to make the code copyrightable.

I could handle that, but reached my limit with Feersum Endjinn.

“A Clockwork Orange” as “Old English” is an amusing anecdote, but it might be worth noting that the novel is written in deliberately nonstandard English mixing in Russian words, so it might be nontrivial to read for people lacking interpolation skills.

In the first paragraph, e.g., there is:

> There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

> many of them don't look like word definitions ("a sharp pain in the back”)

I had to look up the English word (lumbago), but German has the colorful “Hexenschuss” (witch shot). I suspect most people above a certain age can relate to there being a word for this in most languages.

Yes, I experienced this a number of times in my life.

Growing up in a small Swiss village I wasn’t born in, I had to learn that you basically greeted everybody you passed in the road, under the assumption that you knew them or were supposed to know them (more conversations were not needed).

Moving to a large Swiss village, I had to learn that saying hi to random strangers was considered weird at best.

First time I visited Southern California, I was very uncomfortable with strangers striking up random conversations. Later in the trip in San Franciso, I felt that the slightly toned down form of this habit was more comfortable for me.

Moving back to Switzerland after having lived in CA for a few years, I had to relearn old habits.

Vinyl has the benefit that you can largely assume that it will NOT be listened to at all, cf. the studies showing that half of all vinyl buyers don’t even own a turntable.

Absolutely! And I also click them to get an idea how good the source is.

It's impressive that you've even managed to use an em-dash in spoken language. /s

It also doesn't work on Raspberry Pi, though presumably it could easily be made to; it does replace the su binary, but the replacement is not executable.

When I started studying CS, the "industry" thought students should be taught COBOL, and maybe some PL/I and Fortran, because obviously that was what the market wanted.

I imagine Swift is also a very difficult language to compile.

You could do the same in reverse as well. Many of the features listed in the first paragraph existed before in other languages, though probably not all of them in a single language. In fact, I believe the design process (sensibly) favored best practices of existing languages rather than completely new and unproven mechanisms.

So there was considerable borrowing from PASCAL, CLU, MODULA(-2), CSP. It's possible that the elaborate system for specifying machine representations of numbers was truly novel, but I'm not sure how much of a success that was.

I would argue the opposite: Being describable in BNF is exactly the hallmark of sensible syntax in a language, and of a language easily amenable to recursive descent parsing. Wirth routinely published (E)BNF for the languages he designed.

Quarterly earnings will be released April 22. My impression is that in recent years, such rumors tended to cluster around earnings reports (which largely haven't been great the last 2 years or so), presumably as distractions.

The way I remember it is that I used at least Lycos and AltaVista before Google. In both cases, a major reason for switching was that the search itself got cluttered up with ads.

So Google's current trajectory does not bode well for them, as far as I'm concerned.

He may have been a bit of a Milkshake Duck

I wonder whether that was the inspiration for the extensive use of green in the interiors of Severance.

I've been wondering about that as well. It appears he & Vox Day were friends/collaborators and may have shared some political views: https://postcardsfromtheageofreason.com/2026/03/01/bpr1/