I remember how liberating these things were, at a time when there weren't many flexible storage solutions other than floppies (CD-writers were expensive and inconvenient for their WORM-nature). Very affordable as well. Surprised they fell off as quickly as they did.

Plus they gave us one of Jerry Stiller's all-time memorable line reads in Zoolander... "I got two words for you sugar: Zip Disk!!!"

I don't have a non-paywalled version of the article unfortunately, but this article by Robert A Pape is interesting and basically argues that Iran has been positioned to ascend to a fourth global power (alongside America, China and Russia) solely based on how they've played their hand and their dominance of that one strait. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/0...

I worked at Amazon Games, back when we were told we had to dogfood the nascent Lumberyard engine instead of using established industry-standard tech. If you can name any of the games that Amazon released in those 5 years you can maybe guess how that went.

Canada is doubling its military spending this year, up to over $60B, at 2% of GDP. I don't know what goalposts you need to keep moving to get from "not having to spend any money on military" to "next to nothing on military" to eventually get to those numbers, but good luck with that.

What a screwball point of view to call out Canada as antagonizing the US, when the US started a trade war with Canada and has gone so far as to actually threaten annexation. And you think Canada doesn't spend money on its military? It has a massive military for a country of its population size, and has an equally massive reputation both for its peacekeeping and participation in major wars. Canada has been the U.S.'s best trading partner since WWII. "Subsidizing" is a bullshit term for trade deficits. The U.S. does not "subsidize" Canada with a trade deficit any more than Canada "subsidizes" the U.S. with cheap, secure oil and billions of investment dollars.

I thought this was going to be some xenophobic shit, not some xenomorphic shit

I dunno, I worked at Amazon for 5 years and saw some pretty foolish decisions trickle down from the executive pipeline during my tenure.

If you ask 3 different CEOs this question you're liable to get 4 different answers.

From the Facebook/Meta perspective, it appears to means a virtual world with virtual avatars that you would use for everything from corporate meetings to social games to who knows what else. But it's also AR glasses. Or something.

I'm sure a lot of useful science was done and (maybe less-useful) tech was invented, but at what opportunity cost? The bigger picture here is that one dude with extraordinary wealth and power made a massive bet on an obscenely stupid vision of the future. I'm not saying we shouldn't have visionaries in our society, but it's a fairly novel thing that they must drag the livelihoods of so many employees and so much of our economy with them.

Multiple billions of dollars, more than the GDP of some countries, spent in under a decade on a vision of the future that never even passed a basic smell test. Back in 2020 or so I was working on video game teams and we were seeing a big brain-drain to Facebook, with them basically waving huge wads of cash to poach our people to build their metaverse. I don't think any of the people that left were drinking the Kool Aid (at least not the ones I knew of), but it was a good way to make money fast working on cool tech, even if the customers for it only ever existed in Zuckerberg's imagination.

One asterisk for italics and two asterisks for bold, obviously. Except for when those asterisks are for list items, also obviously.

And God help me whenever I need to make a table, especially if I need it to be formatted a non-default way... :-P

I don't know what it's like at Heathrow, but here at Seatac and generally other airports I've been to in the US/Canada you can't even get in line for security without going past a kiosk at the end of a roped-off area where security checks your boarding pass and passports (or other ID) in a computer. You might get lucky and be able to casually look like you're with someone else's party if you try hard enough, but at least whenever we go they always look at the passports and the individuals, including our kids, to see if they match the photos.

My litmus test for a connected TV or set-top box is whether the remote control it ships with sells ad space to streaming services. As of today, I'm not aware of anything that passes that test.

I cautiously put aside my instincts and let my new LG C2 TV connect to the Internet when I purchased it ~3 years ago, because the UX is pretty solid, the gyro remote works really well, you can disable most ads, and at the end of the day it's no more intrusive or ad-filled or data-smuggling as a Roku or FireTV or any other STB that isn't some arcane custom build (I've done that in the past and no longer have the spoons to maintain that kind of thing).

But damned if they aren't constantly trying to find new ways to enshittify it. Latest was system UI toasts advertising some bullshit. I'm always having to hunt through changed menus to figure out what to switch off, where. This will be another thing I'll seethe about and tolerate, until they finally do enough to make me jump ship to the next bad thing.

Generally a big fan of HA, been using it for ~8 years. They've done a lot to make it as user-friendly as possible. Running your own HA server is not for the faint of heart though, even though they've made the installation and maintenance process as streamlined as they can. Because the choices for running it are pretty limited and all have tradeoffs:

* Docker container (can't use add-ons)
* VM running their OS (you need to know how to operate a VM and deal with issues like passing through USB hardware)
* Install their own OS directly onto a box (can't use it for other stuff, limited by the OS)

I've been running it on a VM over the years variously on a Raspberry Pi, on a Mac Mini with Ubuntu installed on it, and most recently a UGREEN NAS. When it works it works great, but when something breaks - and it inevitably does - then God help you if you aren't some kind of Linux wizard. The error messages tend to be unhelpful (if you can even find a way to view them), and half the time I can't even easily figure out if the problem is on the side of the VM or the host.

Also if you're trying to do anything at all unorthodox or on the fringes of what's supported out-of-the-box, you're going down a rabbit hole of debugging YAML and JSON messages and whatever arcane thing you do is something you're going to have to relearn from scratch when it breaks in a year.

Anyway, overall I think it's an excellent product, but you should be prepared to be your own IT staff if you're thinking of using it.

You can't rise to certain levels of a big company's hierarchy without drinking the kool aid. (Or being at least somewhat a sociopath.)