The history of software piracy is a reverse history. Somewhere in the 1960s code was getting robust enough that people would share their code across government and academic computers. By the time the home computer market became a thing in the 70s (Altair & BBS) sharing code was how enthusiasts actually learned to do things on their devices. Then in last days of disco a weird little Little St. James Island frequent flyer wrote a paper in a popular computing mag arguing that programmers should share because he was a greedy little entitled asshole who became the world’s first cintabillionaire by taking the OS code already freely shared with other programmers, copying it, slapping a copyright in it, and selling it back to the company that did most of the work on it.

One of the best jokes of the 90s:

“Windows 95 is a 32bit port of a 16bit shell for a 8bit clone of a 4bit operating system by a two bit company that can’t stand one bit of competition.”

Doctor Strangelove wasn’t just King Kong (Pickens’ character) dying at the end, but most of humanity as well.

The base game has less content than most demos. The full game will cost you around $1400 these days.

We’ve been planning for these errors to happen for years now.

I’ve been using DDG since the beginning when it was an inferior product to Google, manly because of the bang! search feature (which replaced Yubnub for me) and for the privacy aspect. If a DDG search didn’t give me good results, I could just add !g and see the Google results. It cut down my dependence on Google by about 75% at the time but only got better as the '10s wore on. By 2020 it was just a better search engine.

Since then it seems to be going through the same enshittification that Google went through, although they know that they live & die on their privacy feature and that seems to still be better. Instead, they have added the AI summary (“search assist” is not auto by default, so a basic search doesn’t query the AI), prioritize a few of the top hits on the search (along with context results like wikipedia, dictionary, stock summaries, etc.), but the rest of the results on the first page appear to be paid ranking pages. Below that are related searches, and below that is the “more results” button that is the hits that used to come before the paid ranking pages.

Even though it seems to be sliding into the same patterns as other commercial search engines, I still think it is better than most of the alternatives. I still set it to default some from the browser I can do things like search for RAM on NewEgg (“!ne 16gb crucial ram”) and go directly to that page instead of going to a search results page that may or may not be a sponsored link that takes five seconds to load because of spotty wireless & all of the 3rd party elements having to load.

Because Effective Altruism doesn’t mean what it sounds like. It’s a pseudo-ethical philosophy that justifies gross accumulation of wealth with the implication that at some point in time you will use your wealth to do good. The poster child for this is Sam Bankman-Fried, the scam artist CEO of FTX who conned investors into believing he set up a securities-backed cryto-exchange, when in reality the securities firm insuring the cryto was being inflated by the cryptocurrency it was allegedly insuring.

SBFs fall from grace should have killed any legitimacy Effect Altruism ever had, but unfortunately there are billionaire sycophants trying to bring it back to life. I guess the reasoning is if there are that many idiots that keep falling for Donald Trump’s promises, they should be able to find enough idiots in the investor class to keep running the same scam over and over.

Yeah, Disney’s origin story is as shitty as Apples: business man screws his creative partner, expunges him from the company’s origin story, and declares himself the true visionary.

At least this one is a fairly apt description for a crooked body of water.

Just means Axon’s strategy is to get the contracts and the surveillance infrastructure in place first.