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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • If Microsoft hadn’t been around Apple would have probably defined the early PC era. The Apple II was released in 1977, 4 years before IBM decided to enter the home market with the PC.

    Or Commodore might have been the one to dominate. They sold about 5 million Amigas.

    Or it could have been NeXT after Jobs was forced out of Apple and started a new computer business.

    The winner turned out to be Microsoft, but desktop computers were well on their way to being a standard thing long before Microsoft / IBM got into the market.




  • There is probably also money wasted because they’re using old tech. Not that upgrading is free, but often upgrades have far more features and maintaining them is much cheaper than maintaining something that was obsolete decades ago.

    But, you can’t just parachute in a contractor or a “whiz kid” to upgrade the social security or internal revenue systems. The upgrades will take a decade, and that’s not because government is inefficient. It’s because people’s lives are literally on the line. If you “move fast and break things” then Grannie Jones doesn’t get her check and she can’t afford food.

    I do wish governments put more of an effort into staying up to date on computer systems. It would make hiring people easier. And, ideally, governments could be part of the open source / free software ecosystem. I think it would take a few decades of pain to become more modern. But, once it was done I think hiring would be easier and the software would be more efficient and easier to run. Most of the time when a government publishes something, it immediately enters the public domain. So, you could potentially have the government running Kubernetes clusters and adding features to Kubernetes itself. I think you’d also find a lot of open source / free software devs would like to work for the government, getting a steady paycheck and good benefits while contributing good code to open source projects. Right now those people don’t want to work for the government because having to work on decades-old stacks is soul destroying.




  • The best part about this is that Unilever basically just bought the brand name. Ben & Jerry’s is a perfectly good ice cream, but it’s not like there’s some amazing manufacturing knowledge that Ben & Jerry’s has that no other ice cream manufacturer could match. What they are is a popular brand with well known political leanings and, with fun popular flavours.

    If Unilever ever forces them out over too much activism, it would be easy for them to start up a new Ice Cream company and bring all their old customers over. So, Unilever basically has to just accept this activism or lose their customers.




  • English is pretty bad at naming these things. In North-American English they’re often called "Semi"s, which is short for either “Semi-Trailer” or “Semi-Truck”. Why? Who knows, I’m guessing it’s because the trailer part is only half of the whole. The front part with the engine and trailer hitch is sometimes called the Tractor Unit. But, that’s confusing because “Tractor” mostly means the thing you drive around on a farm. The purpose is basically the same, and the name comes from the fact it’s focused on something that pulls, but farming has such a hold of the “tractor” name that that’s what people think of when they hear that.

    18 wheeler makes sense for the whole unit together. It’s also good because it identifies the thing that is instantly visually unique about these kinds of vehicles, all the various wheels. But, I’m sure there are many cases where it’s not 18 total wheels. And, when they’re used as road trains with more than one trailer, I’m sure it’s much more than 18 wheels.

    The Brits like “lorry”, or “articulated lorry” but where does that come from? And sometimes shortened to “Artic” which makes it sound like it’s really cold.

    Other names include “HGV” for “Heavy Goods Vehicle”, but that’s confusing because it’s not clear whether it’s the goods that are heavy or the truck. Presumably they’re also used for light but bulky goods.

    Oh well, dumb language, we should start over with Spanish, I’m sure their name is better.




  • “The average American, I think has, I think it’s fewer than three friends. Three people that they consider friends.”

    This is Zuckerberg, claiming it’s normal not just to have only 3 friends, but fewer than 3. This is telling on yourself even more than “Women’s orgasms aren’t real because no woman I’ve ever been with has had an orgasm.”

    If he counts his wife in that list of “fewer than 3 friends”, how many friends does he actually have? I get that being ultra rich means that often you can’t be sure who’s actually your friend, and who’s just there for the money. But, still, he should at least be able to count a handful of friends. I’ve known my 2 best friends since before I was 5 years old. Surely if Zuck had a normal childhood, he should have people who were his friends long before he got rich, who he can be sure aren’t just there for his money. If he doesn’t, it strongly suggests he was either a pretty awful kid, or he led a really weird life growing up and was isolated from anybody who could have become a friend.


  • The UK is hardly about to go fascist. Labour recently won power and there won’t be a national election for years. There were smaller council elections recently and Reform won a few seats, but so did the Greens and Lib Dems. Basically, there were some anti-establishment votes.

    East Germany voted AfD, but the rest of the country defeated that.

    Canada voted Liberal despite a strong anti-establishment sentiment. It’s likely that eventually it will flip back conservative. But, there’s a chance that before that happens, the chaos of Trumpism will make the conservatives in Canada try to become an adult, respectable party rather than Maple MAGA.