This is what you want to read, and spread to your awful relatives on Facebook https://www.vox.com/2017/12/20/16772670/baby-boomers-millennials-congress-debt
John Carmack retweeted the following, yesterday:
“I wonder why people haven't yet deduced that all CPUs have like 26 bugs at least as serious as this Intel one, it's just that nobody has found them yet.”
TIL about the Cagots, a group of people in France and Spain who experienced systemic hatred and discrimination because... they were Cagots.
They weren't any different from the other people living near them - same skin and hair color, same language, same religion, etc. - but if you were born to a Cagot family, you were a Cagot, and the rest of the people hated and shunned you. And nobody nowadays knows why; the origins of the discrimination have been lost to time.
long excerpt from page on copyright extension and the public domain
What Could Have Been
It didn’t have to be this way. As you can read in our analysis of the subject, if we had the laws that were in effect until 1978, thousands of works from 1961 would be entering the public domain. They range from the books Catch-22, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Phantom Tollbooth to the films Breakfast at Tiffany’s and West Side Story, and much more. Have a look at some of the others. In fact, since copyright used to come in renewable terms of 28 years, and 85% of authors did not renew, 85% of the works from 1989 might be entering the public domain! Imagine what the great libraries of the world – or just internet hobbyists – could do: digitizing those holdings, making them available for education and research, for pleasure and for creative reuse.
@piecritic I hope you guys don't end with a U.S. like system... It kind of sucks, as far as democracies go.
@thewaether agreed. Bird and Face sites are just so... Bad. I feel icky just visiting them. But that's where my IRL friends and acquaintances post, so I still visit...
@kaniini is apparently working on an ActivityPub implementation in go. I think this is a good thing, although I don't like go, I want to see more AP implementations in the world from people with different philosophies besides "ego" and "ancap".
"To Serve Man, with Software" https://blog.codinghorror.com/to-serve-man-with-software/
Great blog post, sums up a lot of my feelings about working in tech in 2017. There's been a lot to grapple with this year.
TIL “tamale” (cornmeal and filling wrapped in corn husk) and “tomalley” (edible fat in a lobster) are unrelated words; I always figured “tomalley” was a corruption of “tamale”.
Nope: “tamale” is from a Nahuatl word meaning “wrapped”, and “tomalley” is from the Carib word referring to that part of the lobster.
@noelle it's because his hands are too short! The stress lines are in his arms as he's trying to bring his hands together, but he's got little dinosaur arms that can't reach each other!
@Elizafox Like a souped up version of the procedural filibuster. Ugh.
In about 1-2hrs I'm going to kick off my Christmas Stream \o/
Me and Loa are together going to not starve, in Don't Starve Together
You can check in on https://twitch.tv/maloki
I am currently hosting someone, who's doing a 24hrs stream, so you got something to watch in the meanwhile!
See you later!
(With apologies to a couple of friends I know working in blockchain startups) is blockchain the ultimate example of putting technologies before actual needs? The first thing I learned from innovation training was "Problem First": find the right tech to solve a problem, not the other way around.
"Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain"
https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100
via @Gargron
What English word has three consecutive double letters?
"Bookkeeper" (although I'm told there are others).
Data Scientist in the bay. Tennis player (4.5). D&D, Gloomhaven, and board game enthusiast. Pronouns he/him.