dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

It makes sense that they wouldn’t have anything to comment anyway. Google themselves don’t actually manufacture most Chromebooks, they only provide the OS. I imagine the majority of the mass of Chromebooks in the world by weight are actually designed and made by Lenovo, Asus, Dell, HP, etc. Even the Google branded ones are manufactured by someone else under contract.

It’d be like demanding Microsoft explain to the news why your Dell caught fire simply because it had Windows installed on it.

Yeah, like, first time?

The presentation has changed slightly but the content is much the same. Back in the good old days I was a moderator on Totse forums (the original, but its web bulletin board incarnation and not when it was a BBS) and we literally had an entire subforum just titled “Bad Ideas.” This was where things got launched, torched, smoked, blown up, stolen, scammed, or otherwise mutilated. Or at the very least all of the above talked about, at length. All of this with an strong implicit suggestion to try it yourself. Most of the kiddos did not actually have the means to pull of what they claimed they did but the ones who could and more importantly had the means to prove it were celebrities. Usually only for a short time, for various reasons.

The early Internet was basically just a repository for bickering about Star Trek, low grade porn, plans for how to build potato cannons, or schemes involving smoking dried banana peels. An immense amount of stupidity has always been there to be found, because the place was and is full of teenagers and teenagers are stupid.

I sure was, when I was one.

My current bugbear is “guesswork,” although in my case this is in the context of the marketing bumf that my vendors and manufacturers slather their products in.

Apparently in the corporate world, the only purpose of guesswork is to “take it out of” things. Take the guesswork out of this, take the guesswork out of that. It seems at this point you are guaranteed that any time “guesswork” appears in a sentence it’s going to be preceeded or followed by it being taken out of something, as surely as U always follows Q.

Once you notice the pattern (it doesn’t take you long if you’re sitting in my seat) the lack of originality becomes deeply irritating.

Especially when the poster does not disclose that it’s AI.

The perpetual Youtube rabbit hole occasionally lands on one of these for me when I leave it unsupervised, and usually you can tell from the “cover” art. But only if you’re looking at it. Because if you just leave it going in the background eventually you start to realize, “Wow, this guy really tripped over the fine line between a groove and rut.” Then you click on it and look: Curses! Foiled again.

And golly gee, I’m sure glad Youtube took away the option to oughtright block channels. I’m sure that’s a total coincidence.

W/e. I’m a have-it-on-my-hard-drive kind of bird. Yt-dlp is your friend. Just use it to nab whatever it is you actually want and let your own media player decide how to shuffle and present it. This works great for big name commercial music as well, whereupon the record labels are inevitably dumb enough to post songs and albums in their entirety right there you Youtube. Who even needs piracy sites at that rate? Yoink!

Those white power redneck types are all protestants (baptists, or some other evangelical wingnut strain) and most of them have a vehement anti-Catholic streak. A black pope would just confirm to them whatever-the-hell conspiracy shit they already believe about the Catholic church, so it’d more or less just be spitting on a forest fire anyways.

Not that the Vatican shouldn’t do it anyway, though.

I get where you’re coming from, but in certain fields I don’t think that’s going to fly too far.

The guy selling me a sofa, I really don’t care if he has a bachelor’s degree or not. My doctor? Yeah, I kind of think he needs to have legitimately completed medical school.