I was hacking a game and accidentally invented a word for when you think someone is trans and you're proud of them for coming out but then you find out they aren't

So I was talking to @gewt about Job: A Comedy of Justice and I came up with a theory that I think explains why Heinlein's late-period work is so kinda-terrible and why I still enjoy it so much

So Heinlein had always been very interesting in the short parts of his novels, like the little snippets inside chapters. He had a very fun writing style, and wrote some fun dialogue with fun characters, right?>
It probably comes from how much of his early stuff was short fiction

And I think what happened with a lot of his longer works is that he'd just start writing fun bits and hope it would end up going somewhere or having a bigger plot by the end. like eventually he'd figure out where this was going, then go back and rewrite it into a cohesive whole

and I'm sure he had editors that'd help this process. No editor would let you publish something as rambly and changing-gears-every-other-chapter as The Number Of The Beast, for example... unless you were God-King Of Science Fiction 1980s Robert Heinlein.

so basically I think what happened is that by the 80s (when he was in his seventies!!) he lost the drive to go back and rewrite and he was too Untouchable for editors to make him.

Do I look like I know what an MPEG is?

di i look like i know what an mpeg is

do i liook like i pw what am ,[eg os

Tomorrow is gonna be fun for anyone in charge of requisitions.

There's gonna be a bunch of SRE teams asking for lockpicks, crowbars, hydraulic rescue tools, chainsaws, and some breaching shotguns

new SRE exercise:
imagine all the digital locks have broken and are keeping you out, and you can't connect in via the network.

how long until you get a console on the main servers?

now figure out how much money you'd lose being down for that long. Multiply out hours-of-downtime by money-per-hour.
There's your budget for designing Creative Solutions to bypass all your security

Although before you go trying to kick down doors:
Remember that doors are secured between the uprights and aren't as easy to smash open as movies might lead you to believe.
But the wall next to the door is probably just drywall and a little insulation.

drywall is also pretty cheap to repair.

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

Company
Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump
By Twitter Inc.
Friday, 8 January 2021
After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter —

we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence. 

In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action.

Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open. 

However, we made it clear going back years that these accounts are

not above our rules entirely and cannot use Twitter to incite violence, among other things. We will continue to be transparent around our policies and their enforcement. 

The below is a comprehensive analysis of our policy enforcement approach in this case.

Overview

On January 8, 2021, President Donald J. Trump Tweeted:

“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form

Facebook is a newstand. But no one can see which news Facebook is pushing to the top.

So we built an app for that called #CitizenBrowser. Our first finding: the sharp impact of Facebook’s political ad ban reversal in the Georgia Senate elections.
https://t.co/GZNdwZOlHW /1

This is the first report from our #CitizenBrowser project. There will be many more to come. But first, I want to tell you a bit about how we did it because it’s the most ambitious thing we’ve ever done @themarkup – and we do a lot of ambitious projects. /2

#CitizenBrowser grew out of conversations @suryamattu and I had about how to audit Facebook. We had both worked on browser extensions to collect data from Facebook, but FB always threatened to shut those down, just like their recent threats against the NYU AdObservatory. /3

But the bigger problem is that browser extensions don’t capture most FB activity. Most people use FB on mobile and browser extensions only work on desktop or laptop computers.

So one night, late at the WeWork, @suryamattu said to me: “We’ll have to build our own browser.” /4

“No way,” I said. “That’s insane.” But slowly, I came around. Here’s why: browsers are good at running in the background. Users could log into FB once through the browser and never use it again.

Then we wouldn’t be monitoring users. We would only be monitoring their feed. /5

I was on @alexandermats show on ET Now yesterday, to discuss Facebook and Google vs Australia when it comes to News content, and how they've taken different approaches.

The key question: can this happen in India?

A thread 👇

1/

1. What's going on?
A proposed News Media Bargaining Code released by the Australian competition watchdog forces Google and Facebook to enter into arbitration with news publishers to decide a price for News on their platforms.

Price for Google to surface news. For users to share on FB.

2. Power imbalance: Australian competition commission believes there's a power imbalance between News publishers and social media platforms. This is true.

3. Google has done a deal with Rupert Murdoch's News corp

3/

and is now offering it “significant payments” for featuring it's publications in its News Showcase. This is a bad precedent in my opinion. Microsoft waded into this debate and supported what Australia was doing.

Why is this bad?
4/

4. There's no compulsion: Google doesn't need to index news. Users want news and Google prioritises news on search results anyway, but publishers can prevent Google from indexing using their robots.txt exclusions. No one is forcing publications from being indexed.

5/