I remember maybe 10 years ago or so when NFTs were at their height I made some disparaging comment about crypto in general on Twitter and instantly was swarmed with crypto-bros who couldn't wait to flood my replies with jargon and nonsense about how great the technology actually was and how I just didn't get it.

I remember frowning at my screen for a good minute and thinking, "I'm not a cryptography expert but I make my career in tech and actually do know a substantial amount of computer science, more than enough to see through the bullshit here. I have work I should be doing today, but fuck it, I'm taking the day off and replying to every goddamn message on here with a specific technical takedown of whatever garbage they're parroting."

It was one of the most decadently gleeful days I can remember, trolling the shit out of every troll that appeared on my feed. It wasn't long before the tenor changed from "here's why you're wrong and stupid" to doing things like calling me a cuck and immediately blocking me so I hopefully wouldn't see the response. But guess what, I did see the response, and responded in turn with an alt account just to tell them how delicious their salty tears tasted.

It was pure, rabid indulgence. It was irresponsible and immature, and a wild high that I rode that entire day. Kind of like the time I went skydiving, in that I've never wanted to do it again since, but still, five stars. I highly recommend everyone try it once.

Something something stopped clock...

An OS that is only capable of running software that requires an expensive ongoing cloud subscription? Sounds like a CEO's wet dream to me

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.