Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧 @pieist@social.cleverlibre.org

The only SF author I know of who predicted a near-future pocketable phone / digital wallet was Mack Reynolds.

@rudytheelder Imagine what Star Trek's prop makers, with their hot-swappable data cartridges about half the size of a cassette tape, would have thought of a cheap and ubiquitous medium the size of your pinky's fingernail that holds about two million average books within about 50 years.

@lauren OTOH this was about the time Apple added the ability to do voice recognition entirely on the phone itself rather than delegating it to its servers, with the result none of the above uses the cloud.

@lauren it gets even worse when you factor in the distrust factor: e.g. you use VLANs to do things like prevent your cameras from accessing the internet and your Google devices from accessing pretty much anything that isn't the internet.

By flashing lightbulbs and smart switches to open source firmware, putting some MQTT glue on a server and writing a few short python scripts I got to the point where I could at least control lights and switches by saying vaguely natural sounding phrases to my iPhone.

Net cumulative effort savings: negative eleventy billion.

@thanhnguyen @Sundae_Gurl
Yep. If the thing you have the least control over and can take the least credit for is the thing you take the most pride in, it's safe to say you haven't actually accomplished much.

@Sundae_Gurl It actually follows if you think about it. Imagine having so little to take pride in that you have to resort to your race.

We started to watch David Letterman's interview of President Zelensky on Netflix.

David Letterman is a terrible, terrible interviewer.

@RobertMaguire I'm always astonished at the close correlation between the kind of real manhood most of us can never aspire to and being a victim in everything, all the time, whilst constantly, perpetually whining about it..

@almostconverge /me boosts a thousand things that catch his whimsy, just for you

@JohnShirley2023 Wow; from the wikipedia page on Brubaker:

@JohnShirley2023 Calls to mind the film Brubaker. Which i happened to watch recently, completely cold; i.e. not knowing anything about it.

Reminder that in 3 days the House will be controlled by the party that "investigated" Benghazi SIX times the last time it was in power.

@furiousrobot If the opposition had been doing a little more opposing I'd share your confidence.

@Popehat 48 of them are old Soviet emigres who know the drill.

Cartoon: House changes hands in 3 days

@ceoln Along with some walnuts for payment

@ceoln I bury the most sensitive communication in the back yard with delivery instructions written in Squirrel.

@JohnShirley2023 #Bester #GullyFoyle #BlueJaunte
When I first read "The Stars My Destination" at ten years old or so, I didn't see anything in the fact that personal teleportation by will alone was invented by Charles Fort Jaunte.