There’s a lot of versions and variations of this, all saying the same thing. Including the comic above. I don’t think any of them are wrong, as long as the message is heard :)

Good English version too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Funding bait

Colour me cautiously optimistic

Hot 73 yo jailbait

If the music is good, yes :)

Old Galaxy Note9 which I’m probably replacing with a much nicer Sony this week. :)

I’m not crying! You’re crying!

DM: yes.

Corporate journalism is digging (no pun intended) its own grave in many cases.

A feedback cycle where no one wants to pay for content, so advertisers are needed to fund their staff, which means clicks and engagement become the metric of success. But, the solution is either publicly funded news (largely unpopular), or regulating the open internet (more unpopular). So, yeah, the death of corporate journalism is coming.

I concur. It is also relatively unmolested in terms of fucking up KDE programs.

1988 was peak old school wiretapping. Like, physical connection to a phone line and a guy in a van. Still doable, but doesn’t scale well. Remember the crazy people that would unplug their phone when they weren’t calling anyone because the microphone could be on…

It wasn’t until the 90s with digital communications that people started being concerned with the possibility of mass wiretapping. See the Echelon NSA conspiracy theories and such.

But we are all wiretapped now all the time and do so willingly. Hey Siri…

I digress. Calvin definitely has a van parked outside. Or at least he can imagine he does, which is close enough.

Wouldn’t put more than like 5V DC on it, but you could use it to put power to some low power USB toys.

I wrote for Ars for a brief period, on Linux topics. This was prior to the digg exodus. As a writer, I got a set rate for each page of content, with an expected average word count per page. I’d get a bonus anytime my story hit the front page of digg, slashdot, or similar aggregater. It happened a few times.

But that bonus incentive meant I was encouraged to specifically write stories that would resonate with those audiences. It wasn’t fraud or a scam – it was free market economic pressure. But the effect was the same – I was tailoring my content to maximize aggregator exposure.

I began to submit my own stories to Slashdot and similar, because a minute of my time could pay me $100 or whatever.

I am not sure that reddit is biased towards these publications as much as they are likely intentionally gaming the algorithms, and encouraging their writers to do the same – write content you know will hit the frontpage. I don’t think it is wrong necessarily, but it certainly isn’t organic.

That said, Ars generally has very high quality content due to some very good reporters. Eric Berger comes to mind. So it could be both effects: quality and gaming the system.

Met him once after he gave a talk on campus. Decent dude.

He asked the lecture hall an interesting question about the explorer mindset. It was during the era of the MarsOne media-fueled vapour hype. “Would you take a one-way trip to Mars?” And then started asking why, or why not (the consensus of the room was nearly unanimously “no”). And talked about explorers ancient and modern, and how risk was no longer tolerated. Very interesting fellow.

RIP.

If you hold your nose really close to the screen, you can pretend to smell it. It’s part of the new jpeg metadata.

Oh right! I’m looking at you “prairie snowdrift” – your white blossoms are not cute enough! Just look at “gumball goodie” over here…

Shhh, they’ll hear!