The silliest part is, they could absolutely keep milking nonsense forever. All they’d lose is exclusivity. Star Wars would be a genre, the way zombies are, thanks to George Romero’s incompetent producers. And every new detail would still be in that vice-grip for another thirty years! Winnie The Pooh is public-domain and Disney’s still gonna slit throats if anyone depicts him wearing red.

They’re scared someone might make a better Star Wars than they did.

Dunno why, when the thinly-disguised competition is Rebel Moon.

And the author spent a year hassling Mozilla about how killing XUL plugins would make his wildly popular plugin nearly impossible. Did they move one iota to help that? Nope. Did they adopt DTA functionality natively, like they’d absorbed Pocket? Did they fuck. Their mantra for two straight decades has been “just rewrite!” and they cannot imagine why they kept hemorrhaging devs and plugins and users once Chrome slimed its way into everyone’s options.

And?

There’s a dozen Firefox extensions that really matter, at any given time. Mozilla has never appeared to give a particular shit about any of them. Paying special attention based on popularity wouldn’t be ideal, but for fuck’s sake, their passive-aggressive treatment keeps burning out the developers who fuel their ecosystem, and it would take vanishingly little effort to shield their keystone plugins.

If their active neglect had ruined both uBlock and DownThemAll - I’m not sure I’d be using Firefox anymore, and I’ve been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox. Why the fuck would anyone normal even consider it?

Never give Nintendo money.

One: thirty-year copyright, no exceptions. Culture belongs to its audience.

Two: noncommercial use is not copyright infringement. Copyright is only a monetary incentive for new works. There is no “unpublish.” Once it’s ours, you are entitled to any money involved, for a time. Take it or fuck off.

“Agreement” is quite a fucking twist on “threat.”

I had hopes for recurrent systems becoming kinda… Dixie Flatline. Maybe not general enough to learn, but spooky enough to evaluate claims.

Well thank god that’s not what I wrote. What does run on corn flakes is natural GI… in several senses.

You do all this on three pounds of wet meat powered by cornflakes.

The idea we’ll never recreate it through deliberate effort is absurd.

What you mean is, LLMs probably aren’t how we get there. Which is fair. “Spicy autocorrect” is a limited approach with occasionally spooky results. It does a bunch of stuff people insisted would never happen without AGI - but that’s how this always goes. The products of human intelligence have always shown some hard-to-define qualities which humans can eventually distinguish from our efforts to make a machine produce anything similar.

Just remember the distinction got narrower.

They were innovating new geometry so the button placement could be even less convenient.

“Why does YAML suck?” is a question. “Why YAML sucks” is an explanation.

wd40

We are all such dorks.

One of the worst words in the English language is “intermittent.”

C is dangerous like your uncle who drinks and smokes. Y’wanna make a weedwhacker-powered skateboard? Bitchin’! Nail that fucker on there good, she’ll be right. Get a bunch of C folks together and they’ll avoid all the stupid easy ways to kill somebody, in service to building something properly dangerous. They’ll raise the stakes from “accident” to “disaster.” Whether or not it works, it’s gonna blow people away.

C++ is dangerous like a quiet librarian who knows exactly which forbidden tomes you’re looking for. He and his… associates… will gladly share all the dark magic you know how to ask about. They’ll assure you, oh no no no, the power cosmic would never turn someone inside-out, without sufficient warning. They don’t question why a loving god would allow the powers you crave. They will show you which runes to carve, and then, they will hand you the knife.

As a userscript author, it is some bullshit.

I assumed he was big on Macs for their own sake. It’s a thing, for music geeks - and obviously he’s a fan of iPods, specifically. Surprised to hear his objectively correct summary of Windows versions.

Mods are asleep, post… as before.

Nah it’s fine, we’ll just do the whole website in Shockwave.