Magnergy

Iirc, the future government (? I guess) weren't trying to find the source to stop the release, but to get a pure sample to study so as to cure the disease in the future. The lady on the plane was there to get the sample.

If their art doesn’t make enough money then it’s clearly not in enough demand.

Unless you burden the word 'enough' with far too much work in that sentence, then that implication doesn't necessarily follow. It is possible for something to be in great demand by those without money to spend. Furthermore, it is possible for there to be issues with the logistics between the source and the demand (e.g. demand is very physically distributed, or temporally limited and/or sporadic).

Money is a very particular way of empowering and aggregating only some demand. It ties the power of demand to history and not moral or egalitarian considerations for one.

Technology Connections has covered this (mis)conception.

Ditto.

Canceling cable used to be, at the very least, a long, phone call that alternated between stretches of hold music dulling the senses and combative sales technique verbal jousting. Canceling a streaming service... I don't think that has ever taken me more than four minutes of finding a webpage and clicking. The collective consciousness is in danger of forgetting/underplaying just how far we have come on this.

If pirating ever takes less than four minutes every other month, I guess it will have reached convenience parity. But it certainly wasn't that back when I was in that game. And I really, really doubt it is now.

Yeah. Someday appliances will probably try to get us to buy their art of electric sheep too.

Well. I've seen some construct a scenario in which some bits of kompromat were leveraged to shift the loyalties of and/or social circles around key players, using just what was public record.

Are We Ready For This Site's Endless Feed of AI-Generated Piped Links?

A very hot hallway.

Right on.

But I think people have to get used to using it for smaller, less important things first ."What restaurant should we go to?" And such like. Otherwise the entrenched interests it would oust have easy FUD ammo against it.

For that smaller stuff the mechanics of the system bog people down, so simple voting's easy count wins in the calories/decision evaluation. Maybe some apps that make it easy to do would be helpful. Or some popular board games using it as a mechanic. Discussion forum comment rankings based on it?

When it first took big bites out of Firefox, it wasn't slight at all. I have only my hazy human memory on this, but some pals and I ran a test script at the time. Iirc, Chome would routinely load enough to start reading in 2 seconds while Firefox was more like 6 on average with our site list and went over 10 way too often to ignore.

It had been very easy before that to blame the sites for all the crud they were larding in. But it was like Google's clean, fast search page compared to Yahoo's "junk you don't need" frontpage all over again. Chrome won on speed fair and square.

Thus ends this yarn by one internet fogey.

I would love to see a debate forum that cut each person's mic after a single point. But I doubt any of the people I want to see in such a forum would ever risk participating.

And we have quite a bit of willpower and imagination to build the craziest, most fucked up intersections that will still expand our cities.

Not just crazy. But glorious and transcendent too. Driving through the enormous multi freeway intersections near Dallas feels like a space age cathedral. Vaults to the heavens, arcs and sweeping forms surround you.

I imagine future archeologists digging it up and wondering about the religion that built it.