An artist I followed fell off the internet and it made me a data hoarder.

In the AOL era.

Okay, well, it doesn’t.

What? No, just via circumstances. As in, the situation will have consequences you failed to predict.

Comeuppance.

That time I had to teach math to Patrick Star.

Runner-up is trying to explain mathematics versus notation… to a math teacher.

I try to rewrite for an audience that’s unfamiliar with American idioms and will read any disagreement in a snotty tone of voice.

Not counting all the times it failed to air because of sportball.

IMO lossy compression is crazier. You do some wizard math on a block of pixels and it shoves all the energy into one corner. Any half-ass job of storing those values will transform back into nearly the same image… so instead, we pursue just-barely-acceptable quality from dwindling fractions of an ass.

Video generators are cool as fuck and I refuse to pretend otherwise. You can tell a robot “make this look more Pixar” and it works. Even if what you feed in is a block of solid noise. Yeah yeah yeah, sometimes you get six-legged dogs who are walking both ways at once, but even those amusing failure cases exist in photorealistic forests pulled from thin air.

This is science fiction technology, and you’re mad at it because of… copyright?

The sounds are completely different and I’m not sure where they’re sourced from.

Nvidia’s anti-competitive monopoly should be broken up over this API.

The fact AMD was visibly scared to even be associated with this project is a big fucking hint to regulators that CUDA is vendor lock-in tool which Nvidia guards at all costs.

My first admin finger-wag in fifteen years on reddit was after a long conversation with some antivax loon. I understand how “Okay, enjoy your dead kids, I guess” could sound like I’m the bad guy, in a vacuum. But we don’t live in a vacuum. Any site unwilling to acknowledge that ‘hey uh your mistakes might end a human life’ can be expressed glibly is not being moderated sensibly.

I used old.reddit.com exclusively, so the app thing never affected me personally. But when the admins started extorting those devs, and lying about it… I started looking for the exits. The day I wrote it off entirely was when they casually announced they’d reject and ignore the site-wide protest of moderators who do all their work, for free.

You can’t own a community.

You can enable them… or you can abuse them. Reddit chose abuse. The enshittification had been undeniable since 2016, when fascists choked the front page, and the admin response was ‘everybody play nice.’

The company doesn’t make anything. The site is an empty box. Every worthwhile conversation on some arcane niche, every thread pruned of idiot bastards, is something users made. It’s not even like Facebook or Youtube, where a significant chunk of (eugh) “content” is profit-driven. A forum is just people talking.

Moral disgust aside, I immediately knew - the quality was fucked. Posts would keep happening. Comments would abound. But the only reason Reddit worked was that voting filters the best stuff toward the top. The same filter does not work on crap mixed with crap. That’s all there’s going to be. Bots and fascists yapping at one another in approved tones of voice. r/Funny with five hundred names.

Dumb bastards tried to sell a recipe for stone soup.

Oh god, and the extra __MACOSX folders everywhere.

It is always better to do that shit with a separate gizmo. Ideally, something computery enough that it will not betray you, or cheap enough that you can take a hammer to it when it does.

Never give your TV the wifi password.

“I’ll ask Jeeves.”

“Phil Hartman guest stars in…”

“What format is that floppy?”

“I bought a Beanie Baby price book.”

It’s run by and for an absolute crank.

That guy is Poe’s law, embodied. Absolutely everyone thinks it’s a joke… at first.

Things I have been permanently banned for:

• Saying dragons aren’t real
• Referencing The Bee Movie
• Pointing out Kamala Harris was not the president
• Upvoting a comment

Admins and moderators of all stripes: you should be handing out three-day bans like candy. You can give people a month-long fuck-off time-out, and in the future, they will think twice. Even if it takes a few whacks. But all a one-step permanent ban does is chase people to new accounts. That’s why outright trolls do it - it’s not hard, and you don’t seem great at catching them. The experience for people who are merely wrong has to be better than for people who are actively malicious, or you will cease to see any difference between their behavior.

I think they’re generic knockoff Walkman headphones. That ultralight style was the default pack-in with any portable cassette player. Earbuds didn’t seem to catch on until the iPod. Anyway just get something minimalist with a metal band.

… wow, every article when you search for this might be pure AI slop.