It would also be nice if it weren’t going to be used for the killer robots. When it very obviously is going to be used for the killer robots.

The Dune books had the “Butlerian jihad” where humanity banned all thinking machines. As a kid I was like “who would ever ban cool shit like that?” Now I’m all “where the fuck is this Butler dude?”

I grew up in the '80s with Reagan and Bush. When Clinton won in '92 I breathed a sigh of relief and stopped paying attention to politics, thinking everything was going to be OK for a very long time. November 2000 was a rude shock when it became apparent that the world didn’t work the way I thought it did. Far more of a shock than 9/11 was.

For that matter, even the Clinton era was not what I thought it was at the time – although it was certainly much better than the current era.

FWIW the trumpers that I know don’t believe that any of the things you mentioned are true. They think all that stuff is a smear campaign by liberals who hate such an effective conservative leader – that’s literally what “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is to them.

Somehow, the only exception to this is the “grab 'em by the pussy” comment which they do believe he said, but they believe he was joking and said it just to piss off us snowflakes.

I have a bunch of trumper coworkers who love to talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome. For fun I’ve been agreeing with them but telling them Trump Derangement Syndrome means that Trump is deranged. They get quite apoplectic.

The search order would end up finding your shortcut first.

Sure, but in my case “Notepad” was a shortcut to actual Notepad.exe. It still should have worked.

Back in the year 2000 I was writing intranet apps for a big corporation, using Visual Basic and classic ASP (lol) and IE6 (lolol) for the UI. A very handy if not indispensable tool for this sort of work is the ability to View Source on the generated pages, which popped up the HTML in Notepad. One day for me this simply stopped worked entirely – hitting View Source did nothing and I couldn’t fix the problem on my computer no matter what I did (other people’s computers still worked fine). I even switched to a different computer, set up all my tools and programs as normal, and got the same problem with View Source not working at all. I went like this for six months, and it was a real challenge to debug problems.

Eventually I discovered the problem from a forum post: I had a shortcut to Notepad on my desktop. For no reason I can possibly imagine, this prevented View Source from doing anything at all. It didn’t even have to be a shortcut to Notepad proper; any shortcut that happened to be named “Notepad” would cause the break even if it was a shortcut to some other program. Renaming my shortcut to “NotepadX” fixed the problem. I would LOVE to have some old MS engineer explain to me what the living fuck was going on here.

which would never happen because I have decency and morals

I would never be in the trump circle of corruption not only because I have decency and morals but also because trump’s type of person is just so fucking awful to be around on a personal level. Those people are just so boring and stupid in addition to being evil. If I knew I was going to have to spend the rest of my life only socializing with them – even if millions of dollars came along with it – I would just kill myself.

Free speech!

[with purchase of regular-priced speech]

I got banned for racism … for making fun of a non-existent race. And the whole point of my comment was to mock racism itself.

any failures in autonomy immediately engage a tele-operator

One of the problems is that these “failures in autonomy” could include a failure to engage a tele-operator when one is needed.

Bourgeoisie Meat Wagon

BMWs are great cars - as long as you buy ones that are at least 25 years old.

School bus transmissions have been like this for over 25 years. They’re all built with 6 gears but if you only want 5 gears (which is ironically is all most school districts actually want) they just disable 6th gear. It used to be that there was a little bit of missing hardware (which could be added later for a considerable price) but now it’s just disabled in software. In the skoolie community (people like me who buy used buses and convert them to motorhomes) you can get your software-disabled transmission upgraded to a six-speed for a few hundred bucks (dubious legality but who gives a fuck).

Surely the only people buying tickets are teenagers who want to have sex in an empty theater?

My pet theory is that Musk was installed at Tesla by the Saudis (who apparently have a bit of money) to destroy the very idea of electric cars by putting out as bad and overpriced a product as possible. Despite his best efforts, people still want the goddamn things.

Some women like tiny faces. Don’t kink-shame.

“I’m serious as cancer when I say that TikTok is a cancer!”

Fucking Federman before the 2024 election castigated his fellow Democrats for daring to use Trump’s actual fucking felony convictions against him as a political tool, because (according to him) Democrats are supposed to be “the party of forgiveness”. Just unbelievable bullshit from him, even worse than his “Trump signs are Pennsylvania’s state flower” comment.

I’m sorry you had to lose your mother to this bullshit.