When they locked out anonymous access to old.reddit.com, I moved on.

Yes, I will miss the technical, humor, and local-events discussions. The rest, I won't.

A slight smile crosses my face at the ad views this will cost them - as one might presume with the current old.reddit.com redirect to a login page (which does not show ads), the only way one would be shown ads on the platform going forward is if one is logged in (and doesn't have an ad blocker). So all those ads being served to anonymous viewers goes bye-bye. I very slightly wonder if the bean-counters took this into account.

This move will create a vacuum. Some other thing, for better or worse, will come around to replace it. The internet, as has been long said, will interprit this as damage and route around it. I still have just enough faith in humanity left to believe this...

I would amend the title to: "Please let the way that most people use the internet die".

And that has to start with individuals.

Are you ready to give up social media and clutivate a local group of like-minded friends who will put in the time and effort to socialize in-person?

Are you ready to shop locally for everything you can, and not order online unless you have to?

Are you ready to walk or drive yourself to your favorite local restaurant to pick up your takeout, instead of using a gig delivery service?

Are you ready to eschew LLMs, even to the point of pushing back on your employer if they insist you incorporate LLM output in your work?

The punchline to my little ol' rant here is that I feel most people are too comfortable with, or too addicted to, or whatever to, the kind of things I mention above, and that for most people, if they think about it at all, might have a passing thought of "why should I bother, some other activist will start the fight and then I'll just like their posts".

With blackjack! And hookers! ... In fact, forget the internet!

Just... no. Do not want.

Perhaps it would be better if that wasn't the case...

I view BO's (heh) New Shepard as roughly on par with the risk of everyday commercial air flight. Some factors increase risk, while others (like the fact that the entire spacecraft is thoroughly checked out between flights and telemetered to heck and back) reduce risk. So overall I think it's probably a wash.

It goes straight up and comes straight back down. Atmospheric re-entry heating is a fraction of that of an orbital re-entry.

The capsule is aerodynamically stable on re-entry. The part that should point forward, will always point forward.

The flight is so short that even if atmospheric conditioning failed, as long as the capsule maintains pressure, there should be plenty of breathable atmo for the duration. This is reinforced by the fact that the New Shepard crew are not required to wear pressure suits.

The LES is a simple solid rocket motor - ignite and it will burn, no valves or propellant pressurization to worry about, so it is as sure to work as about anything else in this world, to get you away from the going-boom rocket behind (plus it has already been demostrated both in tests and in a real-life booster failure).

So, I don't think it was that much of a step for JB to ride the first crewed bird, from a technical perspective. And of course there's other reasons why he might want to be on the first flight, but I'll leave it to others to expound on those aspects...

Doing the Vulcan neck-pinch on the punk on the bus with the boombox was a good start...

Intuit has every right to ask the question (and they did, but in the form of a "demand"), and The Verge has every right to decline (which they did). That's the best possible outcome in my book, because it adds just a little bit more out there for people to see, and learn about Intuit's shenanegans.

If Intuit really thought they had a leg to stand on (they don't), the request would have come from their lawyers. But it came from the communications director - who, I'd wager, got his metaphorical wee-wee slapped after the fact for not preparing the top dog to answer that particular question in a way that would be least-bad for Intuit, which of course was bound to come up, and is now trying to save face.

I've never used a product like TurboTax. In my youth, I did my federal taxes by hand, on paper, and mailed them in. Now I use a tax professional. I can do that, but many other people can't for various reasons, and I look forward to the day when such products is legislated out of existance.

My interest in the Pi and Pi-alike boards has waned significantly over recent years due to the requirements to boot from (m)SD or eMMC, with each board apparently requiring some arcane build of U-boot to make it happen (and no two alike). In my experience, the only OSes that really work on these boards are the ones that come from the board makers (respins of Ubuntu, usually), but that add their own repos in .in or .cn - where lord knows what's going on. No thanks.

My interest in these Arm boards will increase again if/when it becomes common that you can slap a SATA or NVMe SSD of your choice onto the board, and install a stock *nix distribution (i.e. from the makers of the distro - Debian, OpenBSD, etc). Of course, I ain't holding my breath...

Consequences...

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-a...

Coming from a company that embeds telemetry and data collection into its products, enabled by default, and makes it difficult amd/or time consuming to completely disable...

... oh, and there's something in a jar...

s/should/shouldn't/g

If it's too hard to list them all on my bill, then I should be paying them. Problem solved.