Anyone get the joke?

I don't find your defense of technology persuasive. Didn't help that you propagated a vacuous sock puppet Subject with no relationship to your substantive thought. Did you even think about it? Defaults are dangerous.

This reply is on the premise that you are nice guy with good morals. Is there any reason why anyone should be worried about what you are going to do with technology? I hope not, though sometimes good intentions lead to a famously bad road.

Now about that thar' Pope fellow. That's long enough to be book, but I'm skeptical that it would be worth my time to read it. Now if he was a Jesuit, then I might hope for him to say something scientifically interesting, but as things stand...

Disclaimer needed: I, too, am using generative AI. Sometimes experimentally and deliberately and sometimes because it's in the way and cannot be avoided. Rarely for an application, though right now I'm doing a database front end using Claude. Much improved over previous probes along such lines, but I still can't tell if it's mentally harmful to me.

Quoted in response to moderation censorship. Convenient that no substantive response is called for?

And no, I don't really care what offended the "angry" sock puppets. It's sufficient to know that the trolls have no response save feeble censorship. (But there are a number of prominent websites where the feedback/moderation problems were worse. Have to use past tense because I only rarely and erratically check back to see if they improved or fixed anything. I can't think of any examples where I've noticed improvements over time... (The usual pattern is for a new website to appear with some good ideas, and then it fades away. Sometimes slowly, sometimes with an impressive implosion, sometimes into some sort of commercialization swamp.))

Sometimes you have to decide which tradeoff to make. Do you want domestic production, or do you want a low price?

There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

No jokes here. Already a large discussion, but nothing Funny.

Don't look at me. I can't help. Just finished some books about Facebook and only reinforced my theory about greedy fools winning. Not because their ideas are better or even good, but just because they are motivated by dreams of money to work much harder than other folks, even when the other folks actually have the good ideas that might make the world better.

Nothing in the discussion about Facebook, though I have heard reports that internal morale is terrible there. Does mesh with my tentative conclusions from those Facebook-centric books I recently finished. One conclusion is that the idea of connecting the world was bogus from the git-go. The REAL motivation was "domination" and Zuck used to be much more up front about that. The line about "connecting the world" was always limited to marketing hoopla, but the reality of following the money actually led in the opposite direction and Facebook has become the world's best tool for dividing and conquering people by dividing them into as many tiny clans as possible. Natural result of wanting to get as much money as possible from as many advertisers as possible, where each advertiser dreams of targeting AKA conquering the "perfect customers" AKA suckers for whatever they are selling. That's the second conclusion, leading to: For the morality-free investor, snake oil and cryptocurrency are probably the hottest investments now...

So on to the book about TikTok. The "boom" in the title may be giving away the plot?

The problem with Newsom is that he's pretty, but also incompetent.

Unfortunately incompetence doesn't seem to be an impediment to being elected.

Athletes used to use amphetamines for sports before it was illegal. People died.

The amphetamines let you push through the pain, but pain can be a signal that you're in trouble and shouldn't push more.

This is probably costing Canonical $42B/year to keep operating. Better to put their resources on other options, such as putting more packages into snaps.

It's cleaner and better organized than Linux. It's actually easier than Linux.

The only hard part is getting the hardware to work, since there's less driver support for FreeBSD than for Linux. (Admittedly, that's a serious drawback if it impacts you, but nothing if it doesn't).

These are the words of someone who never liked Star Wars to begin with, and wants it to die.

In reality Star Wars is a fine universe, and all it takes is one good story set in that universe to bring life to it. I'd like to see how Palpatine can truly be defeated (who is more the Sith ideology than a character).

Oh, that's good fact finding. Nicely done.

I can't figure out which way your joke is pointing? Who is aligned with which cult leader? Pretty sure it has something to do with climate change, that famous Chinese hoax. (Or maybe I'm just confused by the book about Chinese Buddhism?)

But I can force fit a thought of the day onto the topic. The YOB's strings are being pulled to oppose change, especially towards the wind power he hates so viscerally. I'm not saying I want him dead, but dropping dead might be the least harmful thing he could do now considering the size of the hole and the available options (in his legendary mind)? (It's not like the veep is the anti-christ. More like the anti-charisma. (Then again, the veep is a close friend of all the top suspects for anti-christ, so...(Except for Xi?)))

Worth mentioning that the skillset required to get promoted is not the same as the skillset required to make your team effective.

Some CEOs try to align the two, but I've come to realize that other CEOs actually want sycophant employees to say sweet things to them. King Lear is real. I don't know how you can finish adolescence and still want that, but it's a massive goal of a lot of CEOs.

Maybe you would prefer this movie.

Nice investigation work. Did they give an indication why they left?

I'll be honest I don't even know what this means.