It's always weird trying to determine if things like this will be a flop or a serious societal issue.

Full disclosure: the author is a colleague I've known for almost two decades. But his takes have often inspired mine: There's always someone who knows more than you.

I have no words.

Just did a rewatch. Absolutely everyone is exactly who they need to be for the story to make sense. I've been aware awhile that Billy Crystal basically ad-libbed for several years, but everyone else, well, they needed to be there.

I first watched it on a TV rolled out in ... what, 1987? I was at choir camp and thought it was on the level of "Mary Poppins" with it being years old. To learn that it had just come out was surprising.

And of course, that made "House of Cards" far more interesting to watch. Robin (I'm intentionally skipping her last name here, as it could be misconstrued) being just as shifty as Spacey has pretty amazing, and knowing she's had that range as opposed to Cary Elwes who plays the same guy every time has been fun to watch.

Archive link

Archive link

Here's the salient line: As soon as a Democrat loses the popular vote but wins an Electoral College victory thanks to the support of Black and brown people in currently red states, Republican white folks will suddenly become very interested in getting rid of the Electoral College.

I struggled with which community to put this in, but ultimately: When a presidential candidate tries to stop a movie about himself from being released, that's politics.

I've got my ticket for the first showing in town!

In this case, Facebook's 99-page user policy. The results, embedded in the story, are worth a listen. This is is some serious sci-fi shit compared to ChatGPT.

Archive link ... unfortunately, as I feared, the audio didn't work for me. Here is the direct link to the clip.

I edited the title because people thought this was about actual podcasts. It just generates conversational audio about the content.

Guessing they don't pray. Star Wars reference aside, learning about rampant Android piracy really made be rethink the pay devs receive for their effort. Per Business of Apps:

• Consumers spent $47 billion on Google Play apps and games in 2023
• Over 113 billion apps and games were downloaded on Google Play last year
• 2.61 billion apps and games are available to download on Google Play
• The top grossing app on Google Play in 2023 was Google One, a cloud storage service Instagram was the most downloaded app on Google Play last year, with 521 million downloads

The rest of the report is paywalled, so the number I was curious about -- MAUs (ideally DAUs, but that's a lot of time in Calc) for paid apps with at most 10,000 downloads -- is probably out there, but it's a Beehaw post. That report was the only result on DDG's first page relevant to the query "google play store apps by downloads."

All this to say, Apple's 30% and, well, walled garden that covers piracy to a sufficient extent is starting to look like the better choice for my next phone. And I have been an ardent avoider of Apple products since college.

I buil(t) my rigs, with every component suited to my needs (or budget; YMMV -- winning an i7-8086K gave me a lot of breathing room on the GPU side), but my life on a 24VDC electrical system has convinced me that a laptop need to replace my rig, and Apple seems to have my needed "lots of power with incredible battery life" nailed. But I now have to pick a final product that I didn't build and thus have no idea how to troubleshoot a hardware problem.

Except, I'm a light gamer, building factories and such. Being on ARM doesn't work.

I don't want to be in the iPhone-x86 crowd. Most things are doable, but hardly seamless. But giving up Factorio is a bridge too far.

I'm no longer seduced by Google's lie that app makers are rolling in the dough when it's actually slave wages supporting freeloaders. Sure, this is only one example, but as the issue is with Google policy, it's likely representative. That's why I wanted to see the figures.

Part of me thinks this rant could have also worked in Politics. 🤣

When faced with a future for children that is less than ideal, not having them makes a lot of sense. And yet it's viewed as somehow sacrosanct.

"Stop killing our children"? Why would you have them in the first place when they aren't likely to have an enjoyable life?

Having kids is not a need, and it certainly isn't some odd "that's what organisms do" thing even more insulting than suggesting that's what people do.

Bluntly: Kids you don't have can't die. The easiest way to ensure your kids don't have bad outcomes is not having them.

Don't have kids in a world that doesn't want them. That's true in Palestine, the U.S., and literally everywhere else.

Explaining the rave scene and the appeal thereof has always been an uphill battle.