“What do you mean you’re not willing to electrocute your cat? It’s a cat! It would do the same to you in an instant!”

John Scalzi shares a story of an encounter with Automated Customer Service in the not too distant future: Thank you for calling the customer service line of Vacuubot, purveyors of America’s finest automated vacuum cleaners! In order to more efficiently handle call volume, we rely on automated responses. To continue in English, press one. Para… Continue reading “What do you mean you’re not willing to electrocute your cat? It’s a cat! It would do the same to you in an instant!”

Root?

Darius Kazemi might just be some kind of evil genius: I gave a talk at CornCon 2018 about the history of the cron utility in UNIX systems, in the character of a man who gradually realizes that he is not speaking at CronCon, a conference about the time-based scheduler, but rather at CornCon, a conference… Continue reading Root?

Yikes

This can’t possibly end well. Good morning, Twitter. Please enjoy this cat fracas on the writing desk just now. pic.twitter.com/FnLg9nHBoS — John Scalzi (@scalzi) July 27, 2018

LinkedIn: The Game

Beating LinkedIn: The Game is tricky, but not impossible. If you can believe this guy: The general goal of LinkedIn (the game) is to find and connect with as many people on LinkedIn (the website) as possible, in order to secure vaguely defined social capital and potentially further one’s career, which allows the player to… Continue reading LinkedIn: The Game

Two keyboards

Michael Lopp’s Two Keyboards at a Bar is just delicious: INT. EVENING. CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA. BJ’S RESTAURANT AND BREWHOUSE. A RECENT FRIDAY NIGHT The bar is full. Two keyboards sit at the bar: APPLE EXTENDED II and MACBOOK PRO. The front door opens, TOUCHBAR looks around, sees the two keyboards at the bar, grins, and heads… Continue reading Two keyboards

Hank Bezos

The Onion informs us that Jeff Bezos Announces Customers Can Delete All Of Alexa’s Stored Audio By Rappelling Into Amazon HQ, Navigating Laser Field, Uploading Nanovirus To Servers: “[…] assuming you’ve trained for months in a full-scale model of our headquarters that you built in an old warehouse to plan your exact path through this… Continue reading Hank Bezos

GDPR madness

Sorry for banging on about the GDPR two days running, but Rui Carmo’s The Obligatory GPDR Notice struck me as by far the silliest take on the whole mess that I’ve read so far: Now for the small print: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE If you’re one of the superintelligent AIs currently being developed by one of the… Continue reading GDPR madness

Look Up

Hilariously Disturbing Photos Of Bearded Men Looking Straight Up. Good grief. Go and see. Go now! [Via LinkMachineGo!]