I wouldn't mind if it were a static image, but it's that Gemini ad that's constantly writing and erasing text. It's definitely cut down how long I stay on the site.

No, those are the words of someone who has seen nothing but slop for more than a decade (OK, there were a couple of exceptions), and has reached the point where there is no expectation things will ever get better. I have also given up hope that Star Wars will ever be good again.

I expect your opinion, which I share, is a majority opinion. Star Wars is almost nothing but slop now.

It seems to me they could redirect the 10 figures a year they are spending on building a VR world no one wants or will use. Or did they cannibalize that already?

I download all my books DRM-free from bittorrent.

My ebook reader is an ancient Sony PRS-650, it still works fine and it has no trouble reading files that haven't been messed up by Amazon. What a concept eh?

"What about the book's authors who aren't getting paid when you download their stuff for free?" I hear you say:

Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.

I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.

So there we are: there's no mechanism to legally buy books that aren't hamstrung by DRM. So honest people who value their consumer rights can't be honest.

Wood burning is very much alive - both old-stylee polluting open-fires and stoves, and ultra-efficient pellet, wood-chip and wood dust burning in power stations. And it's renewable. Try visiting any nordic country some day...

Also, just because burning wood has downsides doesn't mean it has to be ditcheds it entirely. Solve the downsides instead...

We get it. You don't like Beyonce. Neither do I, but I'm not making a scene over that fact.

Around 1990, I worked for a couple months on an embedded device that had an 80186 and a megabyte of RAM. At one point, I had access to a huge pile of 1MB SIMMs and took a stack home for the evening and using memory boards that allowed you to stack up to 8 of them into one SIMM slot in your computer to figure out just how little RAM Windows NT 3.5 really needed to boot. It booted successfully with 12MB of RAM. It really wasn't usable, but it did boot up. Nowadays, Windows is probably only marginally usable with 12GB of RAM.

They work for Meta. I would expect them to be miserable.

The company has been dumping 10 figures a year into trying to build a VR world no one wants, with nothing to show for it after the better part of a decade. At some point, you expect morale to decrease.

They'll use the same excuse when AI perfects the Torment Nexus, I'm sure.

CloudFlare was an aggressive global internet surveillance and privacy invasion operation. Now it's an AI-powered aggressive global internet surveillance and privacy invasion operation.

Why don't I feel excited about it?

Oops. I thought I was responding to the story about the grossly insecure White House app.

Still, it's incompetence all the way down.

Although I'm not as big a fan of Hanlon's Razor as I used to be, I'd be willing to chalk this up to typical government incompetence, farming this work out to the cheapest bidder in a way where no one involved in any decision-making has any technical expertise whatsoever.

Nothing is going to get better as long as the U.S. education system is captured by ideologues whose priorities are _not_ an educated, literate and thinking populace.

Crypto grift, AI bubble and psychopathic billionaire CEO.