Silly goose, you don’t own Windows — you license it.

It is kinda brilliant though, the way they set it up.

If you don’t like the joke, you can always fall back to the meta level: this is a 40-something dad recalling how dumb and cringe-worthy he and his friends were in their 20s.

I think part of the problem is that when you read about the horrors of the Holocaust as a kid, you can’t help but think of Nazi Germany as a cartoonishly, outlandishly evil place full of people who spend every waking second thinking about how much they hate impure bloodlines.

You come away with an impression that it should be obvious when genocide is happening.

Then you go home after school and you see something about genocide in the Middle East, and you ask your parents about it and they say “Well… it’s complicated.” And if it’s complicated – if it’s not cartoonishly, outlandishly evil – then it must not be genocide.

Meanwhile…

I tried to be accurate instead of specific.

If I didn’t have to work anymore, I’d have more time to explore potential things to work on, so whatever project I’d pick right now would probably not be my main focus after 3 months of settling into my new life.

From where I am right now, I think it would be something to do with language-level features for distributed computing (but not that web3 nonsense). There’s a lot of potential to weaken the monopoly power of cloud providers by working on something like that, which is why it’s an under-explored area.

But I’d need more people to work with, and some specific use cases to go after. So I would expect the effort to change a lot by the time I actually found the right group of people to work with.

Work on projects that I think are important instead of just profitable.

Shipbreaking

TAKES THE GLOVES OFF and TEARS INTO HIM before SLAMMING HIM

Current Setting: Breed Groot

Take your time. 😇

Define Woke.

Anyone think that will improve anything?

The rich folks still have the money, still want the properties. They just took a pit stop to collect some bonds at a good interest rate for a while.

Once those are off the menu…

Malcolm X put it well:

The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them.

But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the “smiling” fox.

That said, many people have a mistaken view of voting.

They think “I’m picking someone who represents who I am as a person, and so who I pick is a reflection of my very soul.”

Or at best, they think “I’m picking someone who will act in my best interests. I may not like them as a person, but the actions they take are at least a good approximation of the actions I want them to take.”

The reality is more like “I’m picking someone who will inevitably act in the interest of those in power. I need to pick someone who has the right vulnerabilities. They don’t have a good rapport with certain powerful entities, so they don’t mind pissing those ones off if it means they can score some votes as a result.”

You’re not picking someone to lead your side. You’re picking who you’d rather negotiate with from their side.

Depends what you mean by “rigged”.

The parties, the candidates, the PACs, and the media are all theoretically (and in many cases, legally bound to be) separate entities, acting independently. But in reality, a lot of them share the same interests, and so some things happen that aren’t exactly collusion or breaking any rules, but do give an advantage to one candidate, which many voters consider unfair.

In the case of the 2016 DNC primary, I think the critical objection is not the existence of superdelegates, but how they were presented in the media.

Clinton hovered between 54%-59% of the pledged delegates, but the media coverage would consistently include superdelegates in the count, showing Clinton ahead by 600 or so delegates, giving her “70% of the total count, and making her the presumptive nominee! The Sanders campaign doesn’t have any chance of coming back from this!” …before most of the country had even voted.

This kind of thing happens all the time, with lots of stuff, and it’s not technically “rigging”.

But seeing an official-looking number on TV – that you know, provably, doesn’t reflect the reality of the ongoing election… That feels, to many people, like it’s “rigged”.

I generally agree, but Ghouliani in particular strikes me as the kind of desperate idiot that would spend it faster than it’s coming in, leveraging further and further, convinced he’s gonna reach escape velocity into billionaire space.

Edit: Both can be true though.

It’s probably more like the Apple II than the Newton or iPhone. It cost $1300 at the time, which is about $6300 today. For early adopters, it was a revolutionary glimpse of the future. It took another 10 years for it to become widespread.

The attention economy already has people hostage and blocked off from the outside world. No goggles required.

To play devil’s advocate: If we’re gonna have a tech-centric society, I can see where being able to make eye contact with people nearby and keep your hands free could make for a more wholesome experience than staring down at your phone for 80% of your waking life. And for people who are remote, being able to feel like you’re occupying the same space and breathing and laughing together could be a solution for our extreme isolation.

But on the other hand, these are all problems that capitalism and big tech created in the first place, so…

You can buy groceries from a mechanical grocer, but it’ll accuse you of shoplifting like three times while checking you out.

Crackle, and pop.

Internationalization. Don’t have to get icons translated (most of the time), and they always take the same amount of space.