All these damn website changes. Last week, the camera spex were in Ohms.

I would be apoplectic if if took five days for a number port with a constantly changing website and clueless customer service. Not to mention data simply being completely shut off after hitting the “high speed” limit.

Except for being assigned a completely new number instead of porting, with the old carrier having released it. The impacts here on 2FA and having to tell everyone you have a new number when most of your contacts don’t answer calls from unknown numbers. Except you can’t for days anyway, and who knows what calls and texts you’ve missed in that time.

I was fully expecting this to be a categorically terrible vanity project, but the grift exceeds expectations.

I went to a conference for college newspaper editors at the University of Georgia in 2000. The goodie bag included a copy of a UGA professor’s book When MBAs Run the Newsroom. And prescient. Now they run everything and have no fucking clue what the business actually does.

Golden parachute time! They can take some time off while figuring out what to fuck up next.

Agreed. Luckily, they don’t seem to have the full list of Mullvad IPs, so if I really want to read something, I just try another tunnel.

Not the ruling itself, but corporations file all sorts of motions before and during the initial trial specifically so that if a motion is denied, voila! Now the jury verdict and compensation decision isn’t what they’re challenging, but rather technical aspects from rulings by the judge overseeing the trial court … admission or inadmission of evidence is always a popular one.

To suggest that anyone else has the sort of law firms on retainer to play this game all the way to the top is folly. It’s just another way in which the system is rigged.

Not at all … it’s just that corporations, unwilling to take no for an answer, have functionally unlimited funds to throw toward several rounds of escalating court cases while defendants … don’t. It creates an inherently lopsided situation the legal system wasn’t explicitly designed for, but now this is just standard.

Companies walk into these trials essentially seeing the first round as a rehearsal.

Before you built up your collection, how did you use to discover new music back in the day? I’m guessing probably from the radio, this is that for the current generation.

In high school, sure, but CDs were still $20 ($44 in 2025 dollars), and my dislike of the fake tone of advertising made me want to abandon it as quickly as possible. Younger than that, I’d do the whole “hope a track comes on and hit record on a cassette” thing.

When I started college in 1997, mp3s were an entirely new concept, and I wasn’t exactly rolling in cash. My first foray was IRC Fservs in the dorm, and after that, I don’t clearly recall the order of operations regarding Napster, LimeWire, BearShare, Kazaa, ratio FTP servers (one of which I operated via dyndns and led to being exposed to music I never otherwise would have been), and likely a couple of other sources I’ve since forgotten about.

So yeah, it was piracy to start, but finding trance at the turn of the century was nigh impossible without shelling out a Jackson in hopes that the tiny electronic section at Tower Records would hold some gems I’d only be able to discover after purchase. Once tracks became anywhere from 79 cents to $1.89 I slowly rebuilt my extant collection with purchased copies (320kbps sounds much better than 112 to start, and I do like supporting artists) complete with full metadata.

Back when Amazon didn’t completely suck, they often had promos on digital goods when one opted for slower shipping; I got a lot of free music that way, as you could get a $1 credit for each item, leading to the somewhat absurd situation of things being effectively cheaper when purchased and shipped separately, which isn’t where economies of scale come from (and wasteful as hell in terms of packaging).

I hate that this is how our legal system has evolved. Trial courts mean nothing when a corporation loses, because invariably an appeal is filed, and if the circuit court upholds a ruling, well, time to talk to SCOTUS.

Gut feeling, I agree. That said, I’ve heard from friends (let’s hear it for hearsay!) that their friends and relatives seem to be going away from their core beliefs and instead believing everything endlessly spat at them by a glowing rectangle.

I have to think there’s an Ouroboros aspect to all of this. Regardless of Musk’s upbringing, he did bring electric vehicles front and center and oversaw the creation of reusable rockets. These are not small things. Many would be content with that, but then he went megalomaniac … MOAR … MOAR, and now we’re seeing declining sales at Tesla; Xitter is, well, whatever it is; and SpaceX hasn’t been doing great of late.

I’m reminded of Tom from MySpace. Got a few million on the way out, and he’s under the radar, presumably enjoying cocktails with umbrellas in them. Like, if you’re set for life, maybe don’t try again.

People built houses before hammers were invented. But that’s sort of the point of tools: that they can do things more efficiently than we can.

It’s entirely possible he was responsible for some of PayPal, but since, his MO has been, as you said, buying up promising companies. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when he rewrites history to be the founder instead of simply an investor in these firms and claims credit for shit he simply didn’t do.

I fell for it myself for a while. Early days of Tesla, early days of SpaceX … dude knows how to sell and arguably accelerated BEVs, but it appears he doesn’t know how to actually carve tunnels or rewrite mass transit with functionally unlimited money. Not to mention, Starship is having a really bad time these days, which stands in stark contrast to how banal Falcon launches have become.

Calling Musk an engineer is like saying the same about Steve Jobs. Both are(/were) salesmen happy to claim credit for every success while delegating blame for problems.

Not that this is unique to the pair in the current climate of people believing in messianic oligarchs, but I’m not really aware of any boots-on-the-ground innovation that sprang forth from Musk’s mind. The Cybertruck is a fucking joke, and that seems to be the thing at Tesla he was most involved in of late, then broke the windows during a demo.

Leave breaking Windows at a keynote to Steve Ballmer.

OK, and the kernel is written in C and assembly. Should they know both of those as well?

visits page “Would you like to subscribe to our newsletter?” pop-up

Well, that’s templates for you, I guess. But this breathless thing of I just now realized I don’t own my media is a bit absurd. Arr, but I do, and with no data tracking. Win-win.

If you know why you need alpha channels, of course you’re going to save in an appropriate format. But most casual users aren’t going to care. They took a picture of their breakfast or dog and just want to upload now. I’m not arguing PNGs serve no purpose; I’m arguing that most people aren’t Web or app designers. They don’t care whether it’s lossy or lossless, let alone about transparency.

I’ll agree for those use cases, but not everyone is making icons, stickers and emoji.

For production, yes. What percentage of images produced are for production, though? I know damn well how important alpha channels are, but for posting something on social media, which is orders of magnitude more output than image creation within the context of a larger presentation, no one cares.

The vast majority of people aren’t graphic artists. That you and I know what alpha channels are has no bearing on daily use by the masses.

Not seeing how this would affect uptake. Lossless is great for production images, but standard JPEG will do (at low compression) for most Web use cases. Until OS developers coalesce around PNG as a standard (Windows has for screenshots), this is that old standards xkcd.

Alpha channels are nice and all, but how many end users A) have a need for that and B) understand the underlying concept, let alone implementation?

Is that really serendipity, though? There’s a huge gap between asking a predictive model to be spontaneous and actual spontaneity.

Still, I’m curious what you run locally. I have a Pixel 6 Pro, so while it has a Tensor CPU, it wasn’t designed for this use case.