They kind of fix this in the lede, but dude did not invent the internet, he invented the World Wide Web. The internet is a superset of a whole bunch of things that includes the World Wide Web, but dude wasn’t out there inventing TCP/IP and routers and whatnot.

Perhaps it would work better as a series like The Office, although the Australian version was already set in Hell and it didn’t do so great, so maybe it’s best just to leave it on the shelf. The thought of seeing the office dimwit cenobite spilling a vat of chili made from human entrails would be a sight to see though.

Nah, in Hellraiser 2 a mental patient at a mental ward who happened to be good at puzzles was forced to open the box and the centobutes recognized that she had no idea what she was doing beyond executing the dry movements of the Lament. She didn’t have any desire to explore the realms beyond earthly pleasure and sensation in dimensions far past human comprehension beyond not wanting to get in trouble with her captors. It’s not raw desire for just any ol’ thing. the cenobites seek out, it’s a particular desire.

In modern times, the kids would probably be having meet ups and tournaments for speed cubing with this puzzle box, and there’d be YouTube channels dedicated to algos and strats and the poor cenbites would be worked to the bone if they didn’t have those mental filters in place.

If Hellraiser wants to go meta in a future instalment, they can steal this idea. Have the cenobites be forced to industrialize their system, with puzzle boxes constantly being opened and the cenobites having to vet the openers at such a rapid pace that they need to work in shifts…

A tired and weary cenobite arrives back to his home after a long day of false positives. His partner asks him, “no hits today honey?”

“Not a one. There was one that I thought had potential but her desire was a new PR and not a consciousness-rending excursion to the outer realms of earthly sensation. Story of my life.”

“You’ll land one soon, dear. There’s someone out there right now, some world weary hedonist who’s exhausted his options for earthly pleasures and just received his own puzzle box and is going to hit up some YouTube tutorials, hon, I just know it. You’ll see.”

“I sure hope so, babe. Leviathan has been dragging us the last few weeks, and usually they’re pretty chill but I think the higher dimensional beings upstairs are looking at the quarterlies….”

“We’ll pull through dear. Remember that last big account? The billionaire?”

“That guy… yeah his suffering was legendary. That was honestly my best work in years. Wrecked Rectum of the Year candidate, remember?”

“I remember.”

“Glorious…. Such agony… anyways, we should get dinner started yes?”

The first few were good and I rewatched the first two relatively recently. They dropped off pretty hard starting with 3 though yeah? I haven’t watched the reboot but really should do so, but I don’t know if I can stand to watch one without Doug Bradley.

“It is not hands that summon us, it is desire.”

If you have no wish to summon the cenobites, it might be no more dangerous than a Rubik’s cube, but there’s probably some horrible catch where even if you’re 99.99999% sure you want nothing to do with ‘em they can probably still pull out some hellish unfathomably small print legalese on you.

Doesn’t AWS have like a pretty substantial attrition rate amongst employees? Are there many that last 10 years under the best of circumstances as it is?

His… deep… crack?

Mexico isn’t in NATO.

Will they be introducing company stores next?

And won’t exist after January 19, 2038, 03:14:07 UTC.

Our eyes are not perfect organs so why pretend like they are? Our eyes fail us:

• when it’s too dark
• when it’s too bright
• when there’s fog
• when there’s too much rain and snow
• when there’s glare from the sun
• when there’s obstructions
• when there’s sensory overload
• when there’s something covering our eyes like dirt and mud
• when we can only see on the visible spectrum

Why wouldn’t we want more incoming data to account for these shortcomings? Optical-only vision-based solutions are incomplete because our eyes are incomplete. I can’t see that a car is stopped dead in the road 10 feet ahead of me in thick fog, but an advanced set of telemetry sensors can. My eyes are not better than the scores of technology we’ve built over the past few decades and I’ve been practicing with them for 46 years. Give me a helmet that includes LIDAR and infrared and night vision and sonar and telemetry from a satellite and GPS and weather tracking and god knows what else and I’ll be much less likely to rear end that car in the fog. We humans invent technology to make up for our shortcomings, so why go with the idea of “if it’s good enough for biological evolution it’s good enough for these multi-ton contraptions we have hurtling down highways next to each other several metres apart at 100 km per hour every second of every day?” It sounds ludicrous on its face. We can choke on a peanut because our swallow tube is the next to the breathing tube ffs. We can do better.

If Mercurial were as popular as Git I would presume that it would be rewritten in C or Rust, but who can say.

Also Subsurface, a scuba diving log program, but that one is not quite as well known.

https://subsurface-divelog.org/

Dev: “Boss, we need additional storage on the database cluster to handle the latest clients we signed up.”

Boss: “First see if AI can do it.”

Grok has said disparaging things about Elon Musk so I’m assuming it’s going to be disappeared to El Salvador soon.

GitHub Copilot about to be clocking some overtime on COBOL conversions.

Edited to elaborate that yes he announced his resignation on January 6 and today was his last half day.

There really is no way to back to where we were. We can only go forward from here. This is a bell that can’t be unrung.

“What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.”

“What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.”