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Donald Trump doesn’t know how to operate a website

“Someone told me I need pipes for the website. We need to get the best pipes. Do they come in gold plate?”

The Telltale game (I haven’t played it yet) seems to be based on Drummer from the TV show. TV Drummer is radically different from Book Drummer. Book Drummer, certainly in the first six books, is a very minor presence, as the security chief on Tycho Station. TV Drummer is a composite of several book characters.

IIRC, there’s a bit of minor head cannon involving Book Drummer and “The Butcher of Anderson Station”. That might be referenced in the Telltale game, since it’s a prequel for TV Drummer.

But someone recently said he revived the NFT market single-handedly, with people making a bigly 1000% return!

Besides the earthquake, there was also a literal rain of fire across the planet, like a blast furnace, that likely killed everything that wasn’t underground or underwater.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/dinopocalypse-redux

Instead of drilling a hole, another way to do it is to slam an asteroid on the other side of the planet.

https://earthsky.org/earth/dinosaur-killing-asteroid-caused-indias-deccan-traps/

The loophole seems to be having an app pinned to the screen (I’ve never done this, but it presumably keeps the phone from locking) while requiring you to have an unlocked phone to use NFC payments. This doesn’t seem to be a common scenario (I can imagine doing this in some sort of kiosk mode, or giving the phone to a kid and locking the app so he can’t wander around).

Maybe all his companies are like this, it’s just the first one that’s been so public and shown his true colours.

I’m not going to look for it now, but there was a Twitter thread from last year that kind of talks about this.

Basically, SpaceX and Tesla are companies that grew up with Elon as an early investor, and have learned early on how to contain him. They institutionally have firewalls in place to keep him from wrecking the real work they’re doing, like dedicated Musk-handlers that slow walk his bad ideas until he changes his mind a few days later.

Twitter basically had none of those institutional firewalls, and could not container him with company culture.

Meanwhile, you have the Elon fanboys still pretending Twitter is doing better than it ever has.
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Well, it is, if you’re a Nazi.

Suppose you were a business making, say, voting machines. It’s a good business – there are a lot of elections, they have to be tabulated, and you have a way of making that tabulation easier to do. You’re not going to be Google or Microsoft, but you’re in a comfortable niche.

Then comes a bunch of dumbfuck conspiracy theorists who accuse you of rigging the vote against their favored candidate. You’re not happy about this, but this is just a bunch of nutjobs. To some extent, what can you do? Then this major news organization takes up what those conspiracy theorists are saying, and they’re doing this to enrich themselves by putting out news that these dumbfucks like to hear. This amplification is damaging to your business (because it’s costly to defend yourself and you’re losing business anyway), and you can prove that this major news organization is doing this on purpose, for their own profit.

You sue that major news organization. Discovery is a delight, because these people really did know that there was no evidence for any of these conspiracy theories, but they kept repeating them over and over again, damaging your business.

Does this sound familiar? That’s why we have laws so that victims of libel can recover some of those damages.

Now, I’m not saying Musk is justified. Musk can go threatening to sue, etc., and I’m sure ADL lawyers would be delighted to argue before a judge to tell Musk to fuck off, since he really doesn’t have grounds to stand on.

To be fair, those are Mission Impossible chase scenes really disrupt traffic.

Getting rid of Twitter and Reddit has been productive. I read the Expanse (and the novella collection) as well as Project Hail Mary, and the first book of the Three Body Problem.

Making the pee more expensive, yes.

And the BBC.

Frankly, all news organizations should run their own Mastodon servers as authoritative sources for their news articles and their reporters. Right now, with the ever changing badges on Twitter, they’re just Star-bellied Sneetches.

As a former sysadmin who hopped around to different machines to do stuff, I would hate it when I had to type on some developers’ computers, because they had set it up as Dvorak (vi on Dvorak is a special hell). Yes, it’s a more efficient keyboard as long as that’s the only machine you’re on. If you have to use different machines where most of the users are on QWERTY, you just use QWERTY.

Should that not be properly, “Oi, cunt!” ?

We can call everyone “Colonel”, a la Col. Sanders.

I think The Expanse, while an amazing series that should be read anyway, doesn’t fit the bill of “humans are more advanced than the aliens”, since the Protomolecule and everything created by the Romans are essentially in the “tech as high level magic” category. Humans can’t even understand the technology, often saying things like, the Protomolecule just changed the laws of physics.

Well, it could be that the tech tree for intersteller travel is a road not taken by humans

There’s also “Children of the Sky”, which focuses on the humans on the Tines world.

The Honor Harrington series actually has some interesting tech disparities, besides being pretty good/exciting military science fiction.

In the first book, there are Bronze-Age-ish aboriginals.

In the second book, you see several human polities. Harrington interacts with less technologically/culturally developed groups of humans, and there are frictions and opportunities coming from the more advanced polity.

Harrington’s polity generally remains the most technologically advanced group. There’s later interaction with human polities who had thought they were the top dog, in terms of military power.

Just to note, it’s a big series that gets somewhat too sprawling in the later books. The earlier books are Age of Sail (IN SPACE!!!) adventures, which transforms into a wide-ranging interstellar war driven by technology change. Weber’s analogy is sailing ships -> steam ironclads -> Dreadnaught battleships -> WW2 radar directed gunnery / aircraft carriers. Not everyone is at the same tech level.