I will never forget the joys of the playing Half-Life 1 on max settings with my Diamond Monster3D Voodoo2.

I found happiness. I am almost done with it. You want it after me?

This is good advice. Keep the conversation short, formal and boring. Bring up the weather as a signal there is little of interest in the conversation. When you are ready to disengage say “I will let you get back to your work now”

So is Visual Studio basically dead at this point? Are any new programmers choosing to use it?

100% of what?

I feel like Beholders are the product of some nightmare fueled fever dream. They fascinate me endlessly.

Infinite Jest - just the part about video conferencing is wild and is even mire wild when you realize it was written in the 90’s before video conferencing really existed:

“Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation […] let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided.”

Many scientific hypotheses started out as what seemed like crazy ideas at the time. When Galileo and Newton challenged the ideas of Aristotle, this was seen as fringe and radical. When Einstein challenged the accepted Newtonian dogma it was seen as scientific heresy at first. These ideas only seem mainstream to us with hindsight.

Here is a famous faked photo of fairies from 1917 -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies

A lot of legal detail in this post. Here are three key points I pulled out the aricle:

• Internet users have a First Amendment right to speak on social media—whether by posting or commenting—and that right may be infringed when the government seeks to  interfere with content moderation, but it will not be infringed  by the independent decisions of the platforms themselves.

• Underlying these rulings is the Supreme Court’s long-awaited recognition that social media platforms routinely moderate users’ speech

• This term’s cases also confirm that traditional First Amendment rules apply to social media

Some great advice here. I also like this piece of verbal judo: “I have taken up too much of your time, I will let you go now. I have bored you enough with my pedantic nonsense.”

The most powerful thing you can do as a parent is set an example. Not so much in how you socialize with others necessarily, but how you socialize within the family. This sets norms of behavior that your children will model in their interactions with others.

I had an Impala that I named Vlad, so it was “Vlad the Impala”.

Nit exactly a movie, but I rewatched the first season of True Detective. It is a Masterpiece, IMHO.

Correct!

I pulled off and parked in a pullout. But yeah it was backed up for almost an hour.

They had no choice but to settle because much of the evidence was the result of torture and could have been invalid in a trial.

Neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Here are two I recommend:

The Rest is History - two historians, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook go deep on interesting topics from history.

Never Post - a podcast described as “about and for the internet” and in some sense the spiritual successor to Hello Internet but also reminding me of classic Radiolab. Worth checking out.

It is a dog whistle for racism. The facts do not matter and the issues don’t matter. It is just another opportunity put out their message of hate and intolerance.