I will only use this if it uses Clippy’s animations.

Thats… what this is, right?

Clippy 3.0?

Now now, Elon does technically have one patent to his name personally.

Its the shape of the charging port for Teslas.

He patented this with the idea that if he ever did actually build out that massive EV charger network, he would basically be owed royalties if it successfully became the USB C of EV charging ports, so himself personally would be owned royalties if other car companies wanted to use that charging port shape.

But that was like a decade ago, and last I heard he fired the entire team at Tesla dedicated to the charging network.

The problem I am aware of is moreso that the number of programmers that know COBOL is vanishingly small, it … COBOL does not seem to really be taught anymore…

…so if something goes wrong at that level, you may be SOL if you cannot find an increasingly rare programmer that knows COBOL well.

… Are the Feds aware that the core systems that many, many older companies (and government agencies) use are still based on COBOL?

Is… is that not of any concern?

I ran PopOS on linux for years, every game I had worked, and actually performed better than on Windows, once Proton got to version 7.

• with the exception of games that run multiplayer kernel level anti cheat.

** oh and almost all of those games use anti cheats that are compatible with linux/proton, and have been for 3 years, but the game devs/management just refuse to enable that support, even though its already included in their contracts with AC providers for no extra cost.

You can get a dock and plug in a mouse and keyboard, a monitor, etc…

They are monopolists/oligopolists, operating like a cartel.

They create new paradigms as they please, because there is no alternative.

Consumer preferences don’t mean dick in a highly uncompetetive market with absurd costs to entry.

IBM:

Providing hardware and software assistance to genocides of all kind since 1938!

Apparently we are trying to put mediums and psychics out of work.

Smart Pipe Inc. is a registered sex offender

EDIT: My god, they kind of predicted NFTs with this one as well. A literal throw away line of being able to redeem usage points for a ‘digital poster for my digital poster wallet.’

If a drug was rolled out of clinical trials, and huge, huge portions of the people it was given to reported becoming addicted to it and also massive amounts of negative side effects, would you just say

…, well we don’t have a completely precise and thorough model of the causal mechanisms at the chemical and physiological level that perfectly describe how this drug is causing all these side effects…

Instead of, I don’t know, recalling the drug ASAP to minimize harm, maybe do the exact science of it later, in more ethical and controlled conditions?

TikTok obviously has an absurdly huge amount of data, a huge dataset, and they themselves have concluded that their product is addictive and that this very often results in deleterious effects with addictive use, and they’ve intentionally designed it that way.

This is more akin to ‘oil companies have known for decades that their industry causes global warming via their own studies and just decided to not release that information and instead spread confusion and doubt to the public when any other scientists start to figure out the same things they did with the same level of specificity’.

Again: These are TikTok’s own internal studies that they really, really, really did not want to be made public.

Could we actually observe this

Yes. We could look at anything outside of the ‘shrinking bubble’ and measure it, and notice that it’s all becoming ‘larger’.

We would use telescopes of various kinds to measure the apparent angular size of all things outside the bubble becoming ‘larger’ and then use trigonometry to figure out their actual size becoming ‘larger’, whilst things inside the ‘bubble’ would not.

Edit: let me guess you would take your raisin and put it on a triple beam balance.

No, that’s how you’d measure the mass of things that are roughly comparable to human size, not how you measure the size of things.

Mass and size are not the same.

We actually measure the mass of very large objects in space via a combination of many, many different measurements of different kinds, in combination with a whole bunch of physics that would require me to educate you an amount I’d want monetary compensation for, as it would likely take weeks or months or years.

Also, if localized shrinking did exist why would it be unique to our carve out of space?

Ok so from this comment I can infer that you are yourself not in favor of the idea that we are in some kind of shrinking bubble.

I offered that as a thought exercise for you to illustrate that a localized shrinking bubble is an obviously nonsensical explanation.

You don’t seem to find that a compelling explanation, so that’s good, but now I have no idea how your ‘are we just shrinking’ explanation of Hubble’s law works.

…

Do you think everything in the universe is somehow shrinking, at the same rate and scale?

If so… well, not only would that be nonsensical, but it also would not explain Hubble’s Law.

Do you think that the universe is full of ‘shrinking bubbles’, and that the space between these ‘bubbles’ is immune to this shrinkage?

I’d love to see an explanation of that which does not fly in the face of what we understand about the universe.

…

You started this thread asking a question which has an actual and definite answer.

You have in this thread been given simplified metaphors which illustrate this answer from various people.

You’ve claimed this isn’t an academic debate, when the notion of the universe expanding derives from academic study, which you don’t seem to have much grasp of, as you’ve stated that ‘we don’t know much about the nature of the universe’.

My conclusion at this point is that you are being intentionally ignorant and contrarian, demanding people explain nonsensical shrinking concepts which are not occuring and are impossible, whilst you provide absolutely no explanation of anything.

If you want to learn why we believe the universe is ‘expanding’, go watch some astronomy 101 lectures on youtube, or take a course on brilliant, or find a book or webpage explaining this topic, or go take some community college courses or something, hell, just actually read the link I provided to Hubble’s Law on wikipedia earlier.

So, perhaps I was too flowery with my wording here.

Galaxies are unfathomably huge and distant in terms of a human trying to grasp their size as anything relatable, anything other than an abstract number with a huge exponent.

We can and have and still do measure the actual distances to far away galaxies. Likewise with their size, and likewise with atomic and subatomic particles.

We have observed, measured, and calculated that the father away galaxies are from us, the faster they are moving away from us. This concept is generally encapsulated as Hubble’s Law.

but it’s not absurd to say we don’t know much about the nature of the universe

This is in fact absurd to say, unless you take ‘we’ to mean something approximating 5th graders.

Let me try another angle here:

If we, as in, our entire galaxy, and our sense of scale and distance, were for some reason shrinking, and the rest of the universe was static…

Why would we not observe everything outside our galaxy, or solar system, or planet, or whatever the boundary of your proposed ‘shrinking zone’ is… why would we not observe everything outside of that becoming larger?

If this were actually happening, we could very easily measure and observe this… but we don’t.

Big, huge, unfathomably large structures in the Universe, such as galaxies, are measurably expanding away from each other.

The atoms that comprise your body are not measurably shrinking.

We are not shrinking. Astounding large things that are very far away from us are generally getting further away from us, and other astoundingly large things.

To further the raisin bread analogy:

The raisins are not shrinking, the dough is expanding, making the distance between the raisins increase.

… WordPress had a good name?

… Required use of proprietary software causing a bunch of headaches and arguments… somehow makes FOSS less reputable?

Is this guy from another planet?

…

Oh. Oooohhhh.

This is connected to the Prime TumblrBrain Powertripper, the bastard king of the land of delusional manipulative narcissists.

Ah.

That explains perfectly why the discourse around it is utterly contradictory and nonsensical.

Fucking obviously duh its knowingly designed to be addictive and they know it brainrots you.

TikTok’s own research states that “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” according to the suit.

This is the real reason that TikTok should be massively regulated or outright banned for children, not because of specifically oh we we are worried about data security concerns with a Chinese company, but because its functionally a digital version of a mind melting harmful drug.

If you want to be consistent on the data security concept, then basically you’d have to apply that logic to Facebook and Instagram and well pretty much everything these days.

But also, I guarantee you that if Meta or Twitter/X was investigated similarly we’d find out very very similar things about their products intentionally being designed to be addictive and that they know they degenerate your mental faculties as well, and prioritize spreading dubious inflammatory misinformation.

(Well, in Twitter, now X’s case, probably Elon has already destroyed much of that research after he took over, and X now has different and even worse obvious problems.)

Cambridge Analytica anyone?

Tiktok is only different in that it is primarily aimed at children, and that it’s not American.

I am so beyond tired of pretending that modern corporate social media apps are anything other than extremely societally normalized drugs that make us all stupid angry idiots.

EDIT, several days later:

Oh hey look here’s Sam Seder agreeing with the idea that these platforms are products and they should be regulated akin to alcohol and tobacco and harmful pharmaceuticals, who also all had their own internal data showing they knew their products were/are addictive and damaging but just shelved their own studies:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OWMoZJ5OPdg

We got dogfed (dogfooded?) the preview builds.

At some point, one preview was considered ‘good enough’ that basically everyone at MSFT was forced to switch over to it.

Backlash from MSFTs own employees who were forced to use the pre Windows 7 mode version is a huge reason why they ‘sorted it out’.

EDIT: If you don’t know… and maybe they don’t still do this, but I seriously doubt it, MSFT does what they call dogfooding. Most new software versions are released internally to MSFT employees before it goes public, so that they can functionally beta test everything.

Usually it just causes some work loss in minor ways, but with certain widely used or critical software, it can blow up entire projects and workflows for a while.

You are correct, I am not very social.

EDIT: I am also not of the mind that just because something is common and popular doesn’t mean it isn’t stupid, broken and horrible.

… Working as a DB admin / analyst at MSFT through the Windows 8 release also didn’t help.

3 weeks. 3 weeks where we couldn’t do a goddamned bit of work because SQL manager didn’t work properly and you couldn’t have more than 2 panes open at once.

They really, truly thought that taking the windows out of Windows would be just fine for desktop users. We had to argue with people until they stopped lying and admitted that a Win 7 style mode did exist and was useable underneath the Win 8 interface, and they reluctantly made it easier to switch to without following 3 pages of procedures.

MSFT fucking sucks.

Its more than just ‘I’m not very social’, its also, ‘I have a grudge against MSFT from working for them for pennies and being gaslit and lied to routinely, obviously, without shame, for years.’

Google may be getting a looksy from the DOJ for being a monopoly, and now MSFT is doing the same shit that got them antitrusted 20ish years ago, again, on steroids.

I pray that the marinara may flow, that the noodly appendage of the meatball’d one strikes down this objectively evil giant megacorp.

Oh my fucking god.

If I still knew anyone who uses Windows I would be laughing at them.