You won’t unfuck that chicken.

The most anticipated feature of 2015.

Probably not Ankh-Morpork, because Vetenari is nothing if not competent.

I don’t care if the robot that speaks English read the entire library.

How else was it going to happen?

That is not what Firefox has done.

Linking to another instance is kind of silly.

… by submitting queries to another website that only does what’s ruining search engines.

Yeah.

I would still be using 7 if ransomware wasn’t a thing.

I went back to Mint instead.

You pay how much to be told no?

Windows 9x was low-bullshit.

NT and 2000 were corporate enough to be no-nonsense. They belonged to the administrator, but the administrator can be you.

ME was a mistake.

XP was not yet online enough to be properly skeezy.

But from Vista onward, yeah, it’s been an escalating shit-show that’s difficult to miss.

Man, if only home computers were capable of hosting their own servers. Oh well! Guess it’s gone forever.

Tangentially, see Mike Montiero’s talk, How Designers Destroyed The World. His prime example is Facebook changing everyone’s visibility settings by default… leading at least one closeted lesbian teenager to receive death threats from her own goddamn father.

Malice is not required for these decisions to become catastrophes.

Yeah well no shit. Information alone has never killed anyone. But if information gets people killed, the distinction from their perspective is pretty fuckin’ moot.

Eh. The primary obstacles to VR right now are intercompatibility and cost. Facebook’s bullshit is near the right price range, but it’s from Facebook, so it’s bullshit. Everything else is wildly overpriced for what remains a niche secondary gizmo atop already-expensive gaming setups, and it only works on one brand of gaming setup. All these motherfuckers took a scalpel to the nascent industry to slice up their tiny fragment of an itty-bitty pie.

I will tell companies this for free: use a point light source and focus becomes trivial. You don’t need three inches of fancy folded optics. The proper Gumpei Yokoi approach is a textbook drawing of one lens, a liquid crystal panel, and a dot that emits light.

I’ve been telling companies this for free: use intermediate voxels and performance becomes irrelevant. Toy hardware can throw sprites at a zillion frames a second, with up-to-the-nanosecond head-tracking. Make games emit that cheap 3D data instead of giving them direct framebuffer access.

Of course if these people were serious, they’d use lightfield displays. Stick a grid of tiny lenses onto a high-res screen and you don’t need focus because you’re emitting a hologram. Nvidia had tech demos for this, an entire decade ago. The hardware is dirrrt cheap. But for some fucking reason we’re still acting like Palmer’s cheap hack remains state-of-the-art. Just stick fancier pancake polarizing birdbath Zeiss optics on this Google Cardboard thingamajig. More pixels! More pixels!

What a fuck.

Advertising shits in your brain.

Exploiting trust is worse. That parasocial z-list celebrity isn’t recommending something - they were paid to read corporate propaganda.

The most painful version of this is Lindsey Ellis’s video on “Manufacturing Authenticity.” It ends with a deep sigh and an ad read. The brand knew she was doing a video about how brands pay the popular kids to shill their whatever, and they did not care, because all that matters is getting a known face to say the words.

Any amount is the same abuse, just gentler or rougher. Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.

And she’s the kind of woman Spike Spiegel loves: she’ll fucking kill you.