A sternly worded Crunchwrap.

“You are reading at college level.”

Translation: “You are baseline literate.”

Shut off their water lines, cut off their power, cancel trash collection, and close their roads. Failure to abide by the laws regulating infrastructure means they don't deserve infrastructure.

Fixed: Matt Gaetz, former Trump AG pick, had sex with raped an underage girl while in Congress, House Ethics report says

A minor cannot consent.

Based on my cheatsheet, GNU Coreutils, sed, awk, ImageMagick, exiftool, jdupes, rsync, jq, par2, parallel, tar and xz utils are examples of commands that I frequently use but whose developers I don't believe receive any significant cashflow despite the huge benefit they provide to software developers. The last one was basically taken over in by a nation-state hacking team until the subtle backdoor for OpenSSH was found in 2024-03 by some Microsoft guy not doing his assigned job.

“That all life beyond this planet never existed, no matter how irrationally improbable that may be.”

Reminds me of a Fear Factor event my Mormon church group had in which one “disgusting” feat for boys was to shave part of their legs. That particular feat was cancelled when some boys who didn't subscribe to traditional “manly” values happily started shaving their legs for points. Unlike swallowing goldfishes, eating grasshoppers, or attempting to drink a gallon of milk, leg shaving was a step too far for church leaders.

No author credit given.

If the operating system is FOSS, I'd be willing to pay 50% the cost of a Windows license but to the FOSS maintainers and the upstream distros they rely on. Gotta close the causal loop.

So… they removed Wordpad to push people into using Word… and now they removed Notepad to push people into… this monstrosity? Why does Notepad support hyperlinks now?

Back when I used Notepad, it was to strip out rich text formatting and reliably get consistently distinct text, especially if I configured it to use a monospace font. Now I have to worry about embedded hyperlinks sending me to God-knows-where?

Just render the page, page renderer.

<marquee><blink>Under Construction</blink></marquee>

Tech bro billionaires are the only geniuses on earth

Relevant excerpt from The Internet Con (2023) by Cory Doctorow about the folly of thinking tech CEO monopolies are justified due to merit. Later in the book, Doctorow explains how the recent (since the Reagan presidency) appearance of big tech monopolies was instead due to failure of the US DOJ and FTC to enforce anti-trust laws after Robert Bork successfully lobbied to have the Chicago School of economics's consumer welfare doctrine (monopolies can be good if companies pinky promise to lower prices for consumers; see Bork's 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox) adopted by the US Supreme Court.

::: spoiler from Chapter 1 If tech were led by exceptional geniuses whose singular vision made it impossible to unseat them, then you’d expect that the structure of the tech industry itself would be exceptional. That is, you’d expect that tech’s mass-extinction event, which turned the wild and wooly web into a few giant websites, was unique to tech, driven by those storied geniuses.

But that’s not the case at all. Nearly every industry in the world looks like the tech industry: dominated by a handful of giant companies that emerged out of a cataclysmic, forty-year die-off of smaller firms which either failed or were folded into the surviving giants.

Here’s a partial list of concentrated industries from the Open Markets Institute—industries where between one and five companies account for the vast majority of business: pharmaceuticals, health insurers, appliances, athletic shoes, defense contractors, book publishing, booze, drug stores, office supplies, eyeglasses, LCD glass, glass bottles, vitamin C, car parts, bottle caps, airlines, railroads, mattresses, Lasik lasers, cowboy boots and candy.

If tech’s consolidation is down to the exceptional genius of its leaders, then they are part of a bumper crop of exceptional geniuses who all managed to rise to prominence in their respective firms and then steer them into positions where they crushed, bought or sidelined all their competitors over the past forty years or so.

Occam’s Razor posits that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. For that reason, I think we can safely reject the idea that sunspots, water contaminants or gamma rays caused an exceptional generation of business leaders to be conceived all at the same time, all over the world.

Likewise, I am going to discount the possibility that, in the 1970s and 1980s, aliens came to Earth and knocked up the future mothers of a new subrace of elite CEOs whose extraterrestrial DNA conferred upon them the power to steer companies to total industrial dominance.

Not only do those explanations stretch the imagination, but they also ignore a simpler, far more tangible explanation for the incredible die-off of businesses in every industry. Forty years ago, countries all over the world altered the basis on which they enforced their competition laws—often called “antitrust” laws—to be more tolerant of monopolies. Forty years later, we have a lot of monopolies.

These facts are related. :::

Reminds me of the final pages of chapter 3 of the second volume of Maus (1991) in which a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust acts egregiously and unrepentantly racist to a black hitchhiker, surprising a friend who thought that the suffering would have engendered empathy for discriminated races.

::: spoiler page 259 of 296

:::

Torture damages people, plain and simple; don't expect victims to gain wisdom or empathy from the process. So, maybe don't give them nukes and back the religious megalomaniacs among them who end up committing the same genocidal practices against others such as the Palestinians.

I feel like putting a Mentos in there.

“Clearly something you want me to do because you keep on paying, lol.”

Does it act as a dumb monitor? Can all smart TV features be permanently disabled?

Donate if you regularly use Syncthing. Help close the causal loop.

Those engineers should have formed a union and refused until they could collectively negotiate their pay. I can't think of a more straightforward situation in which a union would be more appropriate.

Airplane ears… murder eyes… lacerations on her body… The turds resting outside the litter box… The sliced up furniture… At least one artist was harmed in the making of this image.