Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss. I think I used to know it by heart when I was 6. Now as an adult I can appreciate how it must have been a riotous technical challenge to write a story using only 50 words, with the only multi-syllabic word being "anywhere".
Yes. I'm against authoritarian tendencies and extra-judicial persecutions, even when the targets are a group of people I generally dislike
I still wish it wouldn't go that far. I remember around 6-7 years ago my friends speculated about space tourism over a dinner party. That the contemporary space research wasn't about the environment, it was about rich people's tourism. I was genuinely disappointed that my friends' "silly" predictions turned out to be true.
It takes an enormous amount of buy in. Democracy is a fragile system even at the best of times. It takes a lot to take people who disagree with each other to talk and haggle with each other long enough to make sensible things happen. And it can feel world-ending when your choice loses.
In times of crisis or uncertainty (like these past 10-15 years) some people might think they need a strongman to lead them. The problem with strongmen of course is that they surround themselves by yes-men and they never seem to know when to stop. I can sympathise with the people who want this, but I can't say I agree with the impulse.
I for one don't think that regulations are always in opposition to efficiency. Where would we be with energy efficiency if not for regulations that penalise inefficiency? Living in the EU, I'm happy for the push for USB-C as a common charging port for now, that will make everyone's daily life more efficient (not to mention help us produce less e-waste). How it's going to be in the future, when something better than USB-C comes along remains to be seen.
Meta is evolving in interesting ways. The Oculus Rift line was huge for modelling artists and designers who worked with engineers (the ones I knew anyway). Now they revived Threads but interestingly it's marketed as "Threads by Instagram", because Facebook as a brands is somewhat tarnished, and Meta is a punchline, but Instagram is still popular and well-liked.
My prediction for the Metaverse is, and I'm just another idiot on the internet, that they're trying to make it into a play AND work platform, where people might do online meetings in VR, spend online money with Metacoin to buy real world stuff, then also spend leisure time playing in the Metaverse. The way Amazon have consumers who are also products (and sometimes also Amazon workers), the vision for Meta might be that one day people could live their whole lives on the Metaverse and be this worker/consumer/product in one fell swoop. I wouldn't want that, but I can see how this might be their line of thinking.
Now they're researching a time machine to try to create a conundrum where Musk simultaneously buys Twitter, runs it to the ground, but then in the past re-buys it from himself after he runs it to the ground.
@PerCarita
@discuss.tchncs.de