I don’t get it. The little plastic data slabs in Star Trek TOS were called “tapes”. Apparently the term didn’t have the staying power Roddenberry expected. I wonder how much longer we’ll keep calling our little pocket supercomputers “phones”.

Now that I’m most of the way through Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this actually feels plausible.

20 of them? Just curious, how would you use 800 or 1600 TB of storage?

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Recipe articles are probably the best examples of web content whose only real purpose is ad clicks. All of the text is flavor text, in every sense.

Exactly, that’s how memes work - and I was pointing out how this is true of memes in general, which is why they aren’t good information sources.

That rascal!

Let me tell you about a fellow named Nixon…

Ford. I’m old as dirt. In fact dirt and I were in Miss Hanson’s class together.

That’s why the Internet is broken - there’s no “Let roommate sign for it” field.

Good realization - memes are inadequate oversimplifications that are entertaining but shouldn’t be mistaken for “information”.

Yes, in general forming bonds releases energy and breaking them takes energy. The simplified explanation I remember is that multiple particles are more energetic when they’re apart, because they’re moving around separately. When they join together in a single molecule, moving as one, they give up some of their kinetic energy as heat. Breaking the bonds requires energy to be put back in so the pieces can move around independently again.

Back in college one time the President of the US visited our campus and gave a speech. The security was intense - Secret Service on rooftops and a helicopter that dropped off the Pres and then spent the whole time he was there hovering maybe 60 or 80 ft up, dead still, like it was glued in the air - I thought that part was pretty cool. Anyway a friend of mine chose that day to toss a little chunk of sodium in a fountain out in front of the chemistry building. I wasn’t right there but I heard it made a big pop sound, yellow flash, and sent a column of water shooting up. Dunno if the agents saw it, heard it or both, but man were they scurrying all over the place for a while.

The takeaway is that memes aren’t “information” to help you form your opinions. Memes are little entertainment blobs that vastly oversimplify and exaggerate complex ideas for brevity. Everything in this specific meme is literally true, but they aren’t related. There’s no contradiction or irony, it’s just how chemistry works - it’s often not simple or intuitive, and neither are a lot of other things summed up in memes.

Things just don’t impend like they used to!

Boomer here - that’s pretty much how I managed my software career. Do a contract job for 6 mos to a year, then do theatre until I needed to work again. Had to go back to fulltime work once I got married and had kids. I miss those days tho. Also, fuck your tiny stereotyping brain if you think a whole generation has the same likes and dislikes.

They say it’s not what you know, it’s how soon you know it.

Great history! I can understand Stallman feeling like he deserved more credit, but he did come to be identified with the whole opensource movement as a consolation prize.

In the early 80s I was actually starting to get into Unix bigtime, but then at my my job we got a computer called a VAX that ran an OS called VMS. Everything was plain English and totally intuitive. Like if you wanted to print 3 copies of a file in landscape mode on a printer called Hulk it would be PRINT /COPIES=3 ORIENTATION=LANDSCAPE DEVICE=Hulk <filename>. Fully spelled out it was a bit verbose, but you could shorten anything as long as it was unambiguous. At the time I thought VMS was so much easier to learn, it would blow Unix right out of the water. Today VMS is in the dustbin of computing history. Not the first time I’ve been wrong lol.

Even though it makes no sense, all I could figure out for this was that they were hiding something valuable in a container of benedryl so burglars wouldn’t find it, instead of hiding it in a box of rock salt or a box of nails.