I was really talking about in the beginning of Internet advertising.

I do actually recall what things were like before AOL and eternal September. Google didn't start the hire, they just perfected arson.

In the beginning, websites hosted their own ads. Then they farmed them out to someone else to manage, then that was (almost instantly) abused to deliver malware, then people started using adblockers and websites started implementing adblocker detection and refusing to serve people with such protections enabled.

Nobody seems to be willing to route both the original video and the ads through the same server to seamlessly splice the ads in and make ad detection and suppression more or less impossible.

I'm not sure Disney needs to worry much about inserting ads into streams; the low effort direct-to-video sequels they churn out are effectively merch and theme park ads.

If they give away access to that crap, they'll make it up on plushies and clothing and theme park ticket sales.

Orbital datacenters make no sense when you consider power consumption, radiator requirements, and speed of light delay communicating with the ground. The laws of physics say an orbital datacenter cannot work as efficiently as a terrestrial one.

My question, given that the datacenter concept is obviously a cover story, is what is it a cover story for? The most obvious is that it's to cover stock market fraud, but if satellites actually go up, then there are other, more sinister possibilities.

That factory will stop looking for full time workers now that they've discovered the desperate will take underpaid part time slots that don't require benefits.

We should be looking at this story with horror, not admiration.

Theft of IP is only OK when large American companies do it.

When I was young, I thought people blathering on about class war were propagandized idiots. Turns out I was the propagandized one.

People generally act based on their own selfish interests, and the rich want to be richer. They can buy policy, we can't. They are insulated from us by their wealth and we don't matter. We have no rights, we're not people because we're not rich. They can steal from us but can then wield the power of the government to prevent others from stealing from them in turn.

They don't need to form an army and march on us, they act based on their individual interests that happen to align with those of other rich people most of the time - and sometimes they do actually conspire against us.

They're not going to identify where the weapons are deployed and they're more or less already notified in the public press that they're coming and from which countries. Also... it's not like Russia can do anything about it. They're not going to attack a NATO base to destroy a weapons cache. They can't strike all that far into Ukraine accurately enough to target anything specific either.

I'm all for Russia wasting effort that could have been applied elsewhere to give more advantage to them on the battlefield, though.

DLC and versions. It's still a treadmill for the consumer, but it's an honest one.

A la carte; new features can be sold. Every year you bundle them into the new base version... doesn't affect people with the old version who don't pay.

Every decade you set a new baseline and stop releasing DLC for your old version. Or every five years or whatever.

The point is, the subscription model isn't there for you, it's there for them. The new features aren't there for you, they are there to justify the subscription model. And to bloat the system so you have to buy new hardware which breaks your previous license because it was tied to the OS. It's 99% scam.

I still have WinNT running in a VM. It's idle, not connected to a network, essentially frozen, but it still works if I want to poke around. It would be dumb to open it to the Internet to any degree, but I could do it. I bought the OS, it's *mine*.

Security updates due to newly discovered exploits? Yes.

ANYTHING ELSE NO! Do not change my OS from the one I purchased unless and until I explicitly request it.

Unfortunately an 11 year old EV just isn't worth the battery replacement. The car does what it needs to do, and I'd rather invest in a newer vehicle. It won't be more than a year or two before rust starts eating the thing out from under me anyway.

AI is trained on human data, so good AI output cannot be separated from human output unless the output is long enough that incoherence seeps in.

As AI models improve, the length of output required to reasonably determine 'AI-ness' is going to increase.

This is not a complaint, but I have an 11 year old Leaf and while it reports a 120 km at full charge, it drops to ~80 km by the time you reach the end of the driveway. You don't dare use the heat or AC unless you really need to. Realistically it has about 50-60km of safely usable range.

It's not enough for distance travel because it's possible to find places along the routes I travel where the gaps between L2 chargers are bigger than that, and I'm not stopping for 10 minutes every 50 km when I still have an ICE vehicle that will go 650 km on a tank.

However, it is awesome as a city vehicle. I don't even have a 220V outlet for it - it charges overnight on 110V, and I can get around town without ever needing a gas station.

My experience with the Leaf is why my next car will probably be an off-lease Chevy Bolt, and when I make that move I'll have enough range to do 99% of my driving without stopping.

One less 'cousin' species to daydream about...

We share the FOXP2 gene with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and it is strongly suspected this gene is what gave us our next-level language abilities. It appears to have evolved somewhere between 500k and 700k years ago.

If we split with the hobbits over a million years ago, it's very good odds they didn't have it and couldn't have been significantly more like us than any modern non-human ape species.

If your profit margins vary significantly between countries and the deviation from the expected appears to line up nicely with financial transfers from a high tax country to a low tax country:

A) The high tax country should make that illegal

B) The high tax country's collections enforcement should give your corporation a financial colonoscopy followed by a fine equal to twice what you 'saved'.

In the US, in the majority of regions, it appears to serve the desires of the wealthiest members of society regardless of the expense to the remainder.

In no sane society would datacenters be prioritized over supplying water and power to citizens, nor would standards and enforcement be so lax as to leave water and power supplies unsafe and unreliable so private operators can have better profit margins.

The reason you pay taxes is to support a community that provides common benefit. When there is no benefit - and even if you're incredibly wealthy infrastructure benefits you by providing a nicer country to live in - you have to start to wonder why you're paying taxes.