Since I work in Bay Area tech I’ve met a bunch of people who do, like Guido van Rossum and Sergey Brin. But I only really know one, an astronomer I used to work with.

Also, me eating a fig.

Albuquerque had little shorts guy. Walked around Central Ave near the university wearing naught but a tiny, tiny pair of shorts or thong and usually carrying an anti-war/pro-gay sign. Pretty fun fellow to talk to, but was too into drinking urine imho.

I feel like the fact that you can name all of those as different groups means that you’ve already fallen for the feldspar trap.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

You forgot about leftist infighting.

Much like all of life. Expectations cause suffering.

Minidisc was super cool. I never had one, but some of my college friends did and it just seemed so much better than a Discman.

That was the path I took, but I remember a few college friends and several professors had a Zip drive, as did many of the computers in the lab. By the time I had the money and the need for something like that, 1Gb flash drives were cheaper.

That rings really true. I’ve got a few more health issues, but nothing terrible. My material and financial situation is so much better than in my 20s. But still, I’m just a bit numb about enjoying things and kinda nostalgic for when I felt more. And I miss all of the easy friendships from my college and post college years.

A write off is a colloquialism that refers to reducing your effective taxed income. A more realistic example would be, let’s say you make $250k, but you’re self employed and spent $50k on business expenses like a car and office space. Then you can write off that $50k and only pay taxes like you made $200k.

Heart attack. I’ve had a lot of problems with strep in my life due to an immune gap, which tends to weaken your heart.

Who would use a liquid hog’s dram for thorium?

They are people who have fallen for and/or are grifting for a deeply unhinged conspiracy theory that national laws don’t apply to them if they do some certain set of pseudo legal things. What exactly those things are, as well as what laws don’t apply to them,vary widely, but are usually centered around driver’s licenses and car registration, tax evasion and not paying child support.

Past that it’s hard to explain what their beliefs are because it is so vague and ever changing.

I doubt it will get that far, but discovery in this case would be fantastic.

Portland and Minneapolis? So like, a protest/campout in one or two square blocks while everyone else goes about their normal business?

Christ do I feel old now. CDs and DVDs are read only, so you won’t do anything to them by ripping them. It’s just a copy of the data onto your drive and then probably a compression step of some sort. Nowadays it probably takes less than five minutes for the whole thing. I remember taking at least half an hour on a 2x drive, and then mp3 compression taking another hour or so.

“Spine is so shiny” I… I’m going to be thinking about that phrase all day now.

Basically anything by Danielewski.

It’s not you, it’s the apps. They’re set up that way to get you to pay for them.

Dating apps are deeply, deeply enshitified because the economic incentive for them is the exact opposite of what monogamous users want. Specifically, the apps want you to keep subscribing, plus buy the super platinum plus extra added packs, but never really find someone and date them, because then you stop paying. Old school pre-sellout OKCupid had a great analysis of this in their blog, which was taken down the day they sold out.

This is why the few sites/apps that cater to non-monogamous or event based communities are still reasonably decent, e.g FetLife, Bloom and Feeld, though Feeld is partially down the enshitification pathway.

I’d be really interested in seeing what a fediverse dating app would be like, something that didn’t have the financial incentive to enshitify, and maybe had a match/search system like old-school OKC.

EDIT: missing word.