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Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

yesterday: somewhat viral post about shooting billionaires into the sun (and my stupid "WELL ACTUALLY" reply)
also yesterday: elon musk leaves twitter "for a while" and jeff bezos steps down

COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT!

 elon's gotta be off twitter for a while because they don't have wifi on the SunCrasher 9000, and bezos keeps stealing his phone anyway
elon thought he wouldn't need it because of starlink but THE SATELLITES ARE IN LOW EARTH ORBIT, MUSK, AND YOU'RE HEADED TOWARDS THE SUN
bill gates is the only one who still has internet access because he remembered to set up a long enough ethernet cable

(although tim cook joked that was just because his WinPhone doesn't have wifi support anyway)
zuckerberg asked if bill gates would let him use the network connection for a while and while billy g was fine with it, it turns out none of the other billionaires brought phones with built in ethernet ports

finally, the win95 phone comes up top!
BTW I have repeatedly made fun of the windows phone in a couple posts recently and I think people might mistake it for actually being serious mockery.
it's not that I think the windows phone is behind iphone and android and that's why I mock it for being 16-color or dial-up or having a full size ethernet port or running windows 95
it's that I wish that all those things were true so I could buy one
anyway, google founders page & brin brought along a server but it turns out the hard drive was damaged on lift off so they have a blank drive. they're gonna need to write new code for it, and where are they gonna find developers 20 million miles towards the sun?
then steve ballmer comes around the corner, chanting
the harddrive was partially encrypted, and gates wrote some BASIC code to unlock it but eric schmidt estimated it'd take too long to decode it. There's only 18 months left in their trip to the sun, and their computer would need to be twice as fast to solve it
that's when Gordon Moore (net worth 9.8 billion) walked in
larry ellison slipped a note to musk saying he figured out a way to get to mars, and to meet him down on the cargo deck.
elongate sneaks down there and there's no database dude to be seen, but there's two people...
"Who are you, what do you do?"
"Hi! I'm John"
"Jacqueline, nice to meet you. We make candy!"
it takes elon a second but he finally gets it, and swears revenge on larry ellison
BTW, amusing thing about John there. The first picture that shows up on forbe's "top billionaires 2020" page and on google images is this one:
while trying to find a better picture of him (or a picture of him with his sister Jacqueline, which apparently doesn't exist) I found that it's a cropped version... and they cropped out THE FUCKING QUEEN
you know you're rich when the first picture of you on google is a picture where they had to crop out someone who rules (well, reigns) over 16 countries.
gonna finally change my profile picture/avatar (I'm too old to use the acronym "pfp") once I can get a picture where I'm talking to the pope, and then crop his holiness out
anyway, to finish connecting some of the billionaires together:
michael dell provided the server that the google trio are using, although it was purchased used off alibaba (thanks Jack Ma)
on the trip they're mainly eating chocolate since giovanni ferrero at least brought plenty of nutella.

bloomberg supposedly had organized purchasing all the food but thanks to a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue, he just ensured that warren buffet was on the ship
lee kun-hee keeps making "suck my koch" jokes to tim cook and then elbowing charles but rupert murdoch explains it's pronounced like "coke"
They did have some entertainment on the trip, at least.
George Lucas brought his VHS tapes and that fortnite guy Tim Sweeny brought a DOS laptop with a copy of ZZT loaded onto it
unfortunately steven spielberg is the only one who brought a VCR and he hasn't talked to Lucas since '81, so all they can really do is look at the VHS covers
gabe newell did bring a top of the line gaming PC, but he forgot to enable offline mode before they left so he can't get any of his steam games to load
my favorite thing about this forbes billionaire list is when you get to someone who has their (money) "source" listed as just "cheese"
ahh, there must be a bug there, it's loading the wrong name. lemme fix it real quick... yeah.
it must get confusing because they'd got Eric Schmidt (former google CEO) and Eric Smidt (CEO of Harbor Freight) on the same spaceship
that wasn't the only name confusion by far.
One of the Waltons went up to the founder of the Allegis talent agency and told him how much they loved his work, and he had meekly to explain that he wasn't THAT Jim Davis.
forbes why did you have to put an advert in between these two billionaires
does peter thiel get weaker the closer they get to the sun?

and we all know what he spent his cargo allowance on: a coffin filled with the earth from his home country.
although that brings up a vampire mythology question:
if you're a vampire who needs to sleep on earth from your home country, what if the country you were born in no longer exists?
Peter Thiel was born in West Germany.
Now you can argue that yes, modern Germany is just the continuation of West Germany, because legally it is, but what if he was from East Germany, or, like, Czechoslovakia?
maybe it needs to be dirt that was collected back when that country still exists.
So he's got to find some dirt from prior to german unification
Ted Turner did actually get to take along a set of DVDs and a DVD player but sadly only a B&W TV so he's refusing to watch anything on principle.
I like how the profile for Steve Case doesn't even mention AMERICA ONLINE which is the only reason most geeks even know who he is
(and yes, it's That Steve Case. He's a billionaire!)
oh hey, they've got a kryptonian on board!
Don't they know that he will only be powered up by earth's yellow sun?
anyway, yesterday's billionaires post was this:
https://t.co/n5Uc1rJupS
and my WELL ACTUALLY response was here:
https://t.co/I9sBHHnO5N
with the key take-away being this:
https://t.co/X0UjRaDMlm
besides, clearly I'm suggesting with this thread that we make a reality TV show where billionaires are loaded into a spaceship and we watch them
if we vote one of them out the airlock every week, the show can run for 40 years according to the Forbes 2020 list.
although I'm still wondering on the vampire thing
even if we assume that countries don't matter and you just need it from the general sort of area you were born in, what if that area isn't really there anymore? like, what if it is underwater?
if you dredge up the silt from the bottom of a man-made lake or swim down and dig up some dirt from what used to be an island before the sea levels rose, does it still count as "earth from your home country"?
maybe this is why we never see any atlantis vampires.
they just can't get the dirt
maybe global warming is a long-term plot by the werewolves to finally win the war
a couple centuries from now there's gonna be a bunch of werewolves living on top of mt. everest, drinking tropical cocktails with their yeti friends.

the last vampire is dead. the galaxy is finally at peace.
if a werewolf bites a yeti, do they turn into a werewolf on the full moon?
would they even notice?
"yeah, doc, about once a month I get slightly hairier and feel like howling at the moon. Weird, right?"
maybe it'd work backwards because of how werewolves are on the other side of the hairy-hominid spectrum.

every full moon, the wereyeti shrinks and loses their hair, becoming a human guy named gary
all the wereyeti become a guy named gary.

it's one of the great mysteries of cryptozoology
once every thousand years one will be born who turns into someone named garry or garrison but they are always sterile, and their mutation can't be passed down
anyway your challenge, fiction writers, is to figure out a way that the lack of a "home soil" country is actually a power-up for vampires.
like maybe they can only be truly killed by burying them in their home country?
so if you kill an american vampire, that's easy mode.
go dig a hole in charlotte, NC and stuff them in there, and they're never coming back
west german vampires? slightly trickier, but you just need to make sure it's on a part of modern germany that was west germany.
then you've got vampires from like, Kashmir, and that's way more complicated.
and burying a vampire from a now-underwater island is very tricky. you need lead weights (although silver is preferred for obvious reasons, although that can attract treasure-hunters who might unbury them) to hold down the coffin under the ocean/lake/whatever
and the ultimate threats are vampires from, like, Atlantis or Lemuria or the land of Mu.
They're underwater AND you don't know where the fuck to dig!

More from foone

foone
foone
@Foone
I was todays years old when I learned that Final Fantasy VII's Midgar Zolom is an exceptionally badly translated reference to Jörmungandr, the world serpent from Norse mythology.


The other name for Jörmungandr is Miðgarðsormr, which got rendered into katakana as ミドガルズオルム, or "Midogaruzuorumu".
But when it was translated back into English, the translator didn't get the reference.

So they split that into the city name Midgar and the rest as... "Zolom".
Which is not a word.

It was supposed to be a bit of a pun in Japanese. Midgar, the big city in FF7, is named after Midgard, the Old Norse name for the Earth (as opposed to the other realms of the Nine Worlds)

so obviously a big snake living near the city of Midgar would be the Miðgarðsormr, since that basically translate as "Midgard Serpent"
GAME
foone
foone
@Foone
So I got out some CF cards and noticed something odd about this one. Do you see the weirdness?


How the fuck is a CF card "USB Enabled"?


So CF cards are a weird beast that act as either a PCMCIA card or an ATA/IDE card depending on a mode pin.

They're definitely not USB.

And it's not like that weird SanDisk card I have which you can fold in half and plug it in as a USB device.


It turns out the reason for "USB Enabled" is because it's a Lexar drive from the jumpSHOT era.
This is a normal CF card in most cases, you can use it in normal CF card readers and such
FUN
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foone
foone
@Foone
I like how mediawiki exports pages because there's nothing I enjoy more than parsing a 1 gigabyte XML file

and I'm doing simple-english-wiki! it's way smaller than english wikipedia
I can only imagine how impossibly unparsable that nightmare is

fun fact: when programmers need to write code to extract data from an XML file, the process usually goes like this:
1. find XML file
2. open it in a text editor, see what the structure is
3. write some code that parses that

do you really want to open a 1 gigabyte XML file in your text editor?

do you want to fucking die?

I used to run into this problem back when I worked for the government, because sometimes I'd click a database query log (don't ask why our logs were in XML, it's... complicated) and it would turn out to be 100mb
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
gonna get in line for the vaccine because I've heard all these urban legends about tracking microchips

and I think I might be able to root it and install Doom

supposedly bill gates is involved, right?
so it's probably like a miniaturized 386 running ROM-DOS.

the doctor walks in, looks down at my charts, and sighs.
"well, the bad news is that you've got the virus. I'm sorry..."
"and the good news?"
"well..."
*at doom's gate starts faintly playing from my

it took them four tries to figure out that I had the virus, because every time they did a nasal sample, the diagnosis machine kept glitching and playing a youtube video

I laugh in the hospital bed while they're like "ma'am sir ma'am sir, please, this is serious: we can't treat you. Our ventilator keeps trying to reboot in to Windows 3.1 and play skifree. we're quarantining you here so you don't spread this DIGITAL VIRUS to other patients"
SOCIETY
foone
foone
@Foone
I've only got one quest in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and it's always active.


wow, I think I just rolled a critical failure on my image capture.
I told my script to take a picture of Oblivion and instead got a badly cropped screenshot of Heroes of Might & Magic III, a game I don't even have installed


the endless questions of trying to capture fonts from modern 3D games:
1. what's the native resolution?
2. IS there a native resolution?


it looks cleaner at 1024x768 (earlier one was 640x480)
but not perfect.
maybe 800x600?


nope. I think it's 1024x768, for a simple reason:

this splash screen! it doesn't scale based on resolution, and it seems to be sized the same as 1024x768
GAMING

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Harry Haury
Harry Haury
@letsthinkdeeply
@cain_nate My friend Nate Cain and I have worked hundreds of hours with various politicians and legal groups trying to explain the election laws and how they fit together. There are many misperceptions of what happened during this election and what it means.

Simply put, our election laws are an intricate tapestry designed to ensure accuracy and prevent fraud. They work together like parts of a car. But when certain parts fail, the car is just a hunk of scrap iron and plastic. In this case critical parts failed.
2/

You do not have to prove fraud or intent, you just have to show that the election officials were unable to conduct an election that met the law and relevant certification requirements. In this case, the election does not come close to meeting accuracy requirements.
3/

These specifications are found deep in laws like FISMA, HAVA, and state adoptions of EAC guidance. 1 ballot error out of 125,000 or 1 position read error out of 500,000. Just look at the discrepancies between incoming ballot counts and total votes, the system fails.
4/

It is worse in the the swing states in Democrat strongholds but it is bad in many places. You add the apparent losses of ballots through the Mail and error rates in the ‘system’ are staggering. Why do we have these rules? Sure it is to prevent fraud, but......
5/
FOR LATER READ
\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8 Jules \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8
🇺🇸 Jules 🇺🇸...
@mayweliveasONE
2021 Predictions‼️

Made by James Howard Kunstler

👇🏻👀

Kunstler is said to be one of the best thinkers and authors of our modern era. He’s well known as an expert in energy economics, among other topics.

He is NOT a fan of Trump which makes his predictions even more interesting.

1) The election is re-adjudicated, fraud subtracted from the tally, and President Trump is declared the winner.

2) The mail-in vote for the Georgia Senate seat runoff is disqualified as systematic fraud is revealed. Stacy Abrams is indicted for organizing the fraud.

3) A number of political celebrities, DC swamp rats, K-Street hustlers, media figures, and tech company executives are arrested and charged with serious crimes around election fraud.

4) The CIA is purged and reduced to a strictly analytical role for advising the executive.
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
After the 9/11 attacks, airlines and public buildings adopted a flurry of "security" measures, like taking away pen-knives from fliers or requiring visitors to office buildings to be photographed or present a driver's license.

1/


Bruce Schneier's seminal 2003 "Beyond Fear" called these measures: #securitytheater.

Schneier pointed out that these measures would be easy to circumvent, and were thus providing only the comforting appearance of security - not security

Security theater is worse than nothing. Security theater gives people the false impression that their risks have been mitigated, when actually things are just as dangerous.

After al, if you know that danger exists, you can take some steps to mitigate or avoid it.

3/

But if you have the false impression that you've been made safer, you might unwittingly engage in risky behavior.

4/

Like, if you know your car's brakes are flaky, you might nurse the car along to the mechanic at low speed on side-streets.

But if you don't know about the brakes, you're apt to discover their flaws at 75mph on the freeway.

5/
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Mueller, She Wrote
Mueller, She Wrote
@MuellerSheWrote
THREAD: My thoughts on the decision not to call witnesses. Please correct me if I'm wrong. This take is based on what I think I know, and there's much I don't know, but I do not understand why the dems didn't depose Rep. Beutler. Let's talk about the objections: 1/

First, many are saying it would drag this thing out and prevent Biden's agenda from moving forward. I don't see how that's possible. The senate had the votes to depose Rep. Beutler. We saw that with the 55-45 vote to allow witnesses. GOP can't filibuster that 2/

It would have taken probably a week to depose her and introduce her testimony into the senate record. The senate is scheduled to be in recess this week. The only thing a deposition of Beutler would have done is stopped the senate's vacation. 3/

Since everything would have been done in roughly a week, and the senate was scheduled for a week-long vacation, the deposition of Beutler wouldn't have delayed any of Biden's agenda. 4/

Next, many are saying Mitch threatened to filibuster Biden's agenda. That's also an empty threat. Cabinet confirmations require only a simple majority vote, and the Covid relief package is going through the budget reconciliation process so it's not subject to filibuster 5/
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Russ Bengtson
Russ Bengtson
@russbengtson
the whole point of Dunks was you could go cop them at VIM whenever you wanted for $65. this shit is like having to enter a raffle to buy milk.


like seriously why not make a ton more of them if they're gonna be so sought-after? they land at outlets? so? nike still makes money off that.

the only reason to keep making them so limited is that they KNOW all that matters is the profit on the flip and if they were readily available FEWER people would want them, not more

the whole system is super broken, but it's just gonna go the way it goes, because at this point it all caters to the secondary market. the only reason Nike can sell Jordan 1s for $200 is because the people buying them can flip them for $500

adjusted for inflation, a $65 AJ1 in 1985 is like $160—and modern-day AJ1s are made from cheaper materials in factories staffed by cheaper workers. they don't HAVE to be $200 retail. but the secondary market nuked the whole concept of what sneakers are "worth"
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Anu Satheesh \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3
Anu Satheesh 🇮🇳...
@AnuSatheesh5
Panniyur Sri Varahamurthy Temple Palakkad, Kerala
#KeralaTemples 🚩

Panniyur Sri Varahamurthy Temple is located in Pattambi Taluk of Palakkad District. This is believed to be the first temple in Kerala, where Prathishta was done by Parasurama

Story says that, Parashurama after


Creating Kerala was doing Tapasya here. But he was disturbed as the land faced turbulence. Parashurama sought Narada’s help, who advised him to pray to Vishnu. Parashurama started praying Maha Vishnu. Finally Maha Vishnu appeared and told to do Prathishta of his Varaha Avatar.


As Earth is saved in Varaha Avatar, this temple is famous to solve land related issues.

Many people conduct Bhoomi puja here, which is very special here. They bring sand from around the temple which is used for pooja and then has to be returned to the same spot 👇


from where it was taken.
It is also believed that Perumthachan, the legedary craftsman has abandoned his tools here.
Om Shri Varaha Murthaye Namah
🙏🕉🙏
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GREG ISENBERG
GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg
Life is crazy. Today is a good day to stop and reflect

10 simple questions that CHANGED my life

(startup life, personal life)

Here they are:

Q: Can you really control that?

Smart people know what they can and cannot control

If you're living in the past, you're nostalgic
If you're living in the future, you're anxious
If you're living in the present, you're at peace

Q: Did you start today with a victory?

Starting every day with a victory sets you up to win

I don't care what it is:

- Make your bed
- Make a wonderful coffee
- Hug your wife or children

No such thing as a small win. It's a win!

You'll win more, if you start winning early

Q: What are you optimizing for?

#MFSA
1. Money
2. Freedom
3. Stability
4. Ability

The world rewards those who are focused

Perfectly prioritize

Are you being optimistic?

Guaranteed: more luck when you're optimistic
ALL , GENERAL
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Kevin Murphy
@kwmurphy
Okay look - I didn’t grow up with comic books. But I read stacks of science fiction digests and I kit-bashed model cars into fantasy rods, and just tried to maintain a low profile until I could get out of the house. So you could say I’m a distant cousin of the comic book fan. /1

And sometimes one’s childhood passion follows them into adulthood, sometimes not, sometimes as an adult one finds a passion they never had as a child and embraces it. For me, that must include getting involved with a puppet show at the age of thirty. /2

So who’s to say whose passion’s legitimate and whose is bogus? Nobody. Someone might indict your passion but they have no ground to stand on and should be dismissed out of hand. /3

Maybe they’re envious that you have a passion, maybe they think that their passion is cooler than yours, or maybe they’re just insecure, who knows. Doesn’t matter. /4

What matters is that if something gives you joy, and in the process doesn’t hurt others, then by all means follow it. It’s how we explore our secret hopes, our shadow sides, our inner character. /5
CULTURE
John Papa
John Papa
@John_Papa
Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

Thanks for joining me @pluralsight to talk about javascript frameworks. We had 150+ awesome questions, so I'll try to answer the ones I couldn't get to online right here in a tweet stream

Watch the video -->
https://t.co/G7zeiKhXme


Q. Do arrow functions really make dealing with JavaScript's "this" keywords easier?

A. Yes! When using arrow functions, the scope of "this" is effectively passed in from the outer scope. See here in this REPL

1/n


Q. Where does Polymer fit in? Is it considered a framework like the others?

A. @Polymer is an excellent way to create web components, which are ideal for creating sets of interactivity that can be shared in web apps.

2/n

Q. Have we gone framework crazy?

A. At one time, quite possibly. A few years back we literally had framework overload. I feel it really has solidified into a few very strong choices.

3/n

Q. [Is] there no more need for @polymer?

A. See my previous question on this ... but in general, I think there is a lot of room for Web Components with frameworks.

4/n
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Anu Satheesh
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@AnuSatheesh5
Importance of Famous Payyannur Pavithra Mothiram or Ring

Payyanur Sri Subramanya Swami Temple 🚩
Kerala

Temple, constructed by Parasurama is known as the 'Pazhani' of Kerala.The place got its name from 'Payyante Ooru' where Payyan is another name by which Subramanya was called.


There are references about this temple in Brahmanda purana. Muni Garga mentions this temple and the place to  the Pandavas when they were in Vanavasa. Temple was destroyed two times, once due to fire and then during the attack of Tipu Sultan.


Important tradition here is wearing of Pavithram by the temple priest. Pavithram is a sort of  ring worn during performing Vedic rituals or during the "pithrubali". Usually worn while performing Tarpana or Shradham. The traditional Pavitram is usually made of Dharbha grass
ALL