They just suck in general.

and Beeeereaaaaaannnsss

aren’t there like five of those?

It’s not a competition. Get rid of that mindset.

slrpnk.net - Hippies who like cyberpunk

Completely wrong. Anarchists who hate cyberpunk and want the opposite. Ecologically-minded communitarians. Idealists and hard-nosed pragmatists both.

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I’ve always preferred descriptivism to prescriptivism when it comes to language, so when you say “this is what it means in other contexts so this is what it ought to mean in this context”, in contrast to the way the word is actually used by computer scientists, no cap, I’m rolling my eyes. But we’re not going to agree on that, so let’s move on to the the interesting part of your comment:

Metric sucks. Powers of ten are arbitrary, a fluke of biology. Powers of two are the only sensible way to make a system of measurements. Bias disclosure, I am an American, and so more familiar with US Customary units than either Imperial or Metric.

But hear me out: Volume measurements. I literally never need to make ten times as much of a recipe, or a tenth as much. I need to cut a recipe in half, or double it, all the time. USC volume units, despite the stupid names, are beautiful powers of two from the tablespoon up to the gallon. And the units larger than a gallon are so close, 31 gallons to a barrel and 63 to a hogshead could easily be adjusted to 32 and 64.

I don’t even need to explain 16 ounces to a pound, so let’s move on to length units. Maybe this isn’t the case where you are, but it’s pretty standard over here to have walks studs 16 inches apart. If we accept this as a new “binary foot” or “boot”, we see the world at our fingertips. A mile is damn close to 16^4 inches, so 16^3 boots. If we adjusted to mile to be exactly that number of inches, we wouldn’t even need to change the road signs! And it goes almost without saying that we’d keep the furlong as an eighth of a mile and size city blocks accordingly.

Metric is irredeemable, but US Customary is so close to being actually good. Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk.

While I usually love a good neologism, this one I refuse.

I have it worse, my band is called 1023MB, we still don’t have a gig.

check the username

Whereas I failed Norse Mythology.

I don’t want to talk about it. It’s a Thor subject.

so is f2ap the porn hosting one, or is that just a really poorly chosen name?

I said it before and I’ll say it again: call us all “the Feds”.

The corporate person is a selfish narcissist, a paperclip-maximizing artificial lifeform forever questing after its own advantage. It is an abuser. Like all abusers, it is keenly attuned to any social dynamic that it can use to manipulate its victims, and so social media is highly prized by these immortal colony-organisms.

YES.

Didn’t realize I was reading Doctorow until the end, but amazing essay, thanks OP for sharing.

Interstellar is very bad, that’s not a selling point.

Because the punchline relues on subverting expectation explicitly, not implicitly.