The Quuuuuill

i’m so excited

DON’T

we could do something crazy like create new IPs

thank you

was this… not how it worked before?

gotta get catharsis while you’re processing tragedy somehow. in a lot of ways this guy had it figured out

good thing there’s not any sort of digital information war going on. i assume having everyone’s computers vulnerable will turn out super good

weeaboos

when i was a kid you could get a 95% discount by saying you were there as a full family, you were just waiting for your dad to fly down, and then enter through the golf course

there’s always been absolutely wild loopholes to get discounts at disney. the face price is only there for the rubes that think that’s what everyone pays

having owned an hp printer, absolutely this is a threat

are you not using a monospace font?

if you don’t want alignment don’t be surprised when your code doesn’t align 🤷

Not random. This is a pretty common standard for most style guides that if you split a ternary operator across lines you align the option colon to the ternary itself. Your alt text formatting is way different from the pic by the way

yup. that’s very similar to my stance

that being the case, why was he appointed from the start, and given that this is the type of person 47 wants when there’s no oversight, why did the dems vote to confirm any of his cabinet picks.

art of the steal

deleted by creator

Phones used to be small enough to fit in your pocket, had features that made them useful, and came in a variety of form factors (remember sliding keyboards!?). This is not the future we were promised or the future that we wanted. Today every phone is a rectangular slab that most people can’t reach from the bottom all the way to the top with their thumbs. They are made flimsy so that you must buy a case to entomb your phone in if you want it to last. They have weird bulbous protrusions like google’s camera bar and apple’s lenses so that you even have to look for a case that makes the device ergonomic to have in your hand. They come with spyware you didn’t want, and battery draining features. It used to be a single charge could get your phone through a day and a half. Now they promise us batteries that will last 3+ days and deliver experiences that the battery is drained after 12 hours.

Smartphones are not for us. They are tools of the oppressor class. Kurt Vonnegut was terrified at the prospect of television as a mechanism for addictive control of the populace, but never could he have imagined the terrifying reality of the smartphone. William Gibson did though. He didn’t think it would be a compact rectangle that fits in our pocket, but he did think we would all become addicted to a massively online network of computers that we were never truly separated from even as we navigated the physical world. The problem is too many people read the Sprawl trilogy and thought they would be the super cool hackers that have lots of sex, failing to recognize that the main characters of those books are brutally depressed broken people who are addicted to sex, drugs, and the internet.

And I’m one to talk. I have my phone sitting here next to me. It was made by a big tech company using slave labor. It’s ensconced in a rubbery pink case to keep it from getting brutalized by the realities of my clumsiness. I have apps installed on it. I check it throughout the day. But I would get rid of it instantly if my work would provide me with a hardware MFA device. They will not because “it costs too much money.” It would cost them $60 to furnish me with one. “But that doesn’t scale to all of our employees and contractors.” We all get paid 6 figures and receive various benefits through the company. That when faced with a choice between furnishing us with MFA devices or requiring we own smartphones, they choose the latter. They even give us a $150 stipend to make sure we have a smartphone. They are spending more to make sure we have smartphones that it would cost to have MFA devices that they claim are too expensive.

Why? The only reason I can fathomably come up with is that a smartphone also keeps us shackled to our work. We can be out walking our dogs and get a notification ding on our phones and immediately be back to thinking about what we were doing at our desk. Nowhere are we free from work when we have a smartphone in our pocket. The administrative state has us at their constant beck and call. And what’s more, the law enforcement agencies love our phones, too. They have GPS, tower triangulation, and with 5G the towers are closer together and the triangulation is more precise. Never, so long as your smartphone is powered on, are you truly free from the surveillance state. And I don’t even think there’s any one person (except for maybe Peter Thiel) who likes every aspect of this system of power between the bosses, landlords, law enforcement agencies, and technocrats. I don’t even think each aspect of the system is aware of their role in the system. But nevertheless, the system of oppression and torture we live under persists to the benefit of 22 truly horrible human beings.

android 4-7 were perfect. it all went to shit with Oreo, we just didn’t realize it at the time because we thought the changes were minor inconveniences we’d get used to. once md2 dropped, we should have realized we were cooked, but it was still… innocuous how small and mildly annoying the changes were. by 2020 though i had noticed: no good updates had come to my phone in almost 4 years and every update just broke something that used to work. then in 2023 google announced gemini was adding new features to the assistant. features that had slowly gotten broken but had worked back in 2015. this is our lives now. a constant churn of features being taken away and brought back