umbraroze

I was just reading about pirate radio stations. One pretty bitter post by a busted pirate radio operator went like "while a large number of police officers were busy chasing us through the forest, a guy got stabbed to death in the downtown. I think the raid on us was a gross mistake of police resource allocation."

This is like that, but even more petty.

Tracing a call is instant. It took longer back in the days when there were physical switches, but that's been a long, long time ago.

Yup. Back in the days of analog phone exchanges, you literally had to send a guy to check electrical connections between lines. Which is why it took time and which is why they encouraged the people to keep on the line as long as possible.

Digital exchanges added call tracing as a design requirement. Everything gets logged. Even if you spoofed or blocked your number, the phone company knows what you did. They are the Phone Company.

Ok, now I'm miffed that Google caved to Reddit's demands and paid up.

Because this set a dangerous precedent.

Earlier, Google got a lot of demands from various publications to pay up for indexing the publicly available news sites. And they always responded with "Ok, guess you leave us no other choice than just exclude you from indexing altogether." Let the site simmer for a while until they went "oh shit, not being indexed by major search engines sucks. we didn't really mean it please come back"

It's especially jarring because Reddit doesn't even produce their own news content anyway. That search engine money isn't going to the content creators. News sites at least could say they need to pay for their content to be written by their employees.

Meanwhile, me aboard a train: "Oh you can get whole massive meals on restaurant cars these days? No thank you, I'll get a coffee and one of those overpriced naff sandwiches." (Well, the Finnish train sandwiches are pretty good, but they are hella overpriced. Like 7€. WTF.)

The Washington Post: "Democracy dies in darkness"

Wikipedia: "Knowledge that is shared in torchlight is fucking awesome"

Oh I have a Forever Mouse. Bought a Microsoft Intellimouse Optical in 2001 or so. Still works. Use it with my Raspberry Pi sometimes. Also bought another Microsoft wireless laptop mouse like a decade ago. Still works just fine.

...The Logitech mouse that I bought against my better judgement in 2020 is starting to show signs of fatigue.

Also how the everliving hell do you add AI to input devices? Are they just going to guess what I'm pointing at?

No, can't have been written by geese. Geese cannot read or write, they just straight up honk.

This is a clown car. That's the most reasonable explanation.

As a kid, all of us nerds got our own computers eventually after much begging. (Commodore 64s and such.)

And occasionally, we had the magical moments when we got to visit the occasional person who had a big computer. (PC clones)

No information superhighways yet!

Cyberpunk Edgerunners (the Netflix anime) is pretty damn great and well worth the watch.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a pretty decent game too. Not a masterpiece it was originally hyped up to be, and a lot of things in the game just painfully remind me of things that other games do better, but it's still a pretty damn gripping game with pretty incredible atmosphere and style. Probably pretty high in my best games of the decade list.

reCAPTCHA is exploiting users for profit

Well duh.

reCAPTCHA started out as a clever way to improve the quality of OCRing books for Distributed Proofreaders / Project Gutenberg. You know, giving to the community, improving access to public-domain texts. Then Google acquired them. Text CAPTCHAs got phased out. No more of that stuff, just computer vision rubbish to improve Google's own AI models and services.

If they had continued to depend on tasks that directly help community, Google would at least have had to constantly make sure the community's concerns are met. But if they only have to answer to themselves for the quality of the data and nobody else even gets to see it, well, of course it turned into yet another mildly neglected Google project.

One of my favourite tragicomical video game achievements was in Firewatch:

Adopted a turtle as a pet. The average lifespan of a box turtle is fifty years. It will outlive you.

And this is why I will not get a pet. I'm by definition incapable of taking care of them because they might outlive me.

Probably a floppy disk hardware emulator, something that essentially plugs to the original system's floppy disk interface, has a drive for modern removable media (USB/SD card/whatever), and buttons/displays to support disk image swapping and unmount/eject.