Joe Thompson

I visited the Huntington campus last year after SCaLE ended and enjoyed it so much I plan to go back again this year.

Oh hey, if you're around today I'd love to meet you. I'm a huge fan from way back in the day (which would be about 2015).

Cordova Cafe is walking distance from the convention center (northwest corner of Cordova and Las Robles) and opens at 7 AM.

"Modern technological society requires exploitation of an overseas underclass" pitted against "poor people in technological societies can no longer afford the basic necessities of life in such a society".

When it doesn't, society becomes distorted in horrible ways where we now are presented a choice (which I believe is false, but it's the choice we're shown):

I want an iPhone to cost the consumer *what it actually costs*.

And if you propose fixing it by ending or even moderately reducing the exploitation, as like as not you will be subjected to a screech of "DO YOU WANT AN IPHONE TO COST $2000?!"

Further to your point #1, I find it appalling how many people do not understand the deep, stinking well of human exploitation that "same-day Prime delivery" or "a $500 smartphone" sit atop.

Just saw a post presenting a narrative that the current generation of IT cool-kids is comparing notes not on things like "how much did you ship?" but "how many agents are you running?"

In my case the answer is "zero", and yes I do consider that a flex.

Saw a sentence in an old Business Insider profile of Satya Nadella that knocked me back a step: "When something didn't work he was unafraid to ditch projects, such as skipping Windows 9 to go straight to the superior Windows 10."

It always feels weird to get a charity solicitation that is *specifically* about including them in my estate planning. Like they're saying "Hey, we figure there's a decent chance you'll die pretty soon. Make sure and keep that money coming in one last time after you do, eh?"

(I switched to tinyurl as a shortener a few years later when Bitly started requiring signup to shorten links.)

I think I picked up using QR codes for conference slides from somebody else I saw present at a meetup. At any rate my first conference presentation in 2017 had a QR code and a Bitly link on the last slide, so people could scan it during Q&A.

Sadly the most relevant Sagan work for our current moment seems to be _The Demon-Haunted World_.

It also gives you a short text link preview of QR codes detected in the ordinary camera view, which is very cool.

Screenshot of an iPhone's photo app previewing a link from a QR code in a photo in the photo roll. Link goes to https://afontofuseless.info/os-behind-the-curtain/

E.g. a screenshot of my phone doing this with a photo I just took of a QR code to the slides for my most recent conference talk:

A lot of phones now detect QR codes directly in images in the photo roll, so somebody can take a photo of one and send it to you and your phone can extract the QR data from it.

There are companies I've never bothered trying to get a job with for basically exactly this reason.

If the below feels absolutely inscrutable, well, you should see what it's reacting to.

IIRC there were three types discussed: "whales" that drift through the atmosphere, "plankton" that the whales eat and which ride updrafts to higher altitudes and then fall back to lower ones where they reproduce and their spawn take their first ride up, and "sharks" that fly and hunt the "whales".

When I was a kid I read the book version of _Cosmos_, which has a section imagining what life forms on a gas giant might be like.

- phone is unseen. where is phone?!
- phone, smugly: I am right here, 18 inches away (exactly where you put me). q: how long will it take you to realize your laptop screen is blocking your view of me?
- a: far too long

At least twice a week I do this:

- walk into living room
- set phone down on the back of couch
- set laptop down next to phone on back of couch
- start laptoppin'
- laptoppin', laptoppin'
- need phone
- where is phone? look all around room

This will of course be highly lucrative, because I can play both sides of the street: shops subscribe to the feed for a daily fee, but patrons can *also* subscribe to the feed for a lower monthly fee.

At the suggestion of a loved one, I will be quitting my IT job and creating a new restaurant-industry startup, which produces daily riddles and trivia for coffee shop chalkboards.

It's the same mindset creating the same problem as was seen with "warrior cop" training for police starting decades ago.

Those "sort of works but not consistently" solutions all involve it being unpowered for some period of time. Is it possible it just needs better cooling? Anything in the internal layout or external location of the PC changed that might be making the GPU run warmer than it used to?

Having a slice in a pizza joint in Boston, and the counter guy (who sounded vaguely Eastern European while taking our order), sings along when the muzak starts playing Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler".

Kenny Rogers, global ambassador of fellowship?

(I think it was already out in the UK at that point, or was just about to be, so I assume the interviewer had read it and noted the error prior to the interview.)

The first time I heard her name was when, on the eve of US publication for her then-latest book (_Outrages_), she inadvertently revealed to a BBC Radio interviewer that a major part of the book's thesis was based on a misunderstanding of the term "death recorded" in historical English legal records.