I suppose they meant that it slows down their internet, not the internet

The Usenet post I linked to claims it’s originally from the 1st quarter of 1990, but who knows if that’s accurate or not. I actually can’t find a good source for whether Stumpf is the original author or just the one who posted it to rec.humor.funny.reruns, but it’s usually attributed to him at any rate.

But yeah, fairly ancient by internet standards. I remember first running into it in the 90’s

The WHO hopes its latest declaration, that mpox is a public health emergency of international concern, will trigger greater support to the areas most affected.

lol, good one

Meaning that he knows he’s sharing bullshit

Makes sense that it’s not a Tesla.

You sure he’s getting hoodwinked and not sharing shit he knows is fake on purpose?

Stalin was nominated twice

The program’s path from a CP/M app by MicroPro onward is winding, being shoved into a half-baked office suite, acquired by SoftKey, which became the Learning Company, acquired by Mattel, spun off to Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep, and is now the archival property of—well, nobody’s quite sure.

Looking forward to the eventual frivolous takedown notice and/or lawsuit – suits seem to have absolutely zero brains when it comes to this stuff. Or, well, when it comes to anything except making themselves and their buddies on the board richer, really

Hah, huge surprise that this was their reaction. Garbage product made by a garbage company run by garbage people.

Yeah they’re just a bit disorganized, but generally it’s a really nice country. “Our infrastructure is a bit bad, but we’ll get to it mañana – let’s have some wine and tapas.”

Then there’s countries like Russia or Belarus that are also medieval, and not in a good way.

maybe they could improve the search results in general

They have no incentive to do that. What they do have an incentive for is showing you a lot of bullshit results that also conveniently happen to use their ad network, so you have to click on multiple pages and see more ads before finding what you were looking for.

Huge surprise that the mostly centrist and center-right EU institutions are somehow totally fine with countries sliding into fascism

I really don’t get this sort of attitude. Do you seriously think that nobody is allowed to even write about how the EU could potentially use existing mechanisms and treaties to expel autocratic states unless everything about their own society is “sorted out”?

Like, does this mean that eg. people in Finland can’t currently talk about autocracy in the EU because we have an extremist right wing government?

The thing is though that no matter what the EU does populists will weaponise it, and very often it doesn’t even have to have anything but the most tenuous of connections to reality. All the small “sanctions” against Hungary (mainly temporarily withholding funds) have already been painted by Orbán as unjustified attacks.

The persecution narrative is there, and while yes expulsion might play into it, just about literally everything else the EU could do to Hungary would also play into it – and even if we did let Orbán do what he wants, he’d still spin the same story about the evil EU keeping Hungary down because right wing extremists always need an external enemy.

Personally I think that freezing Hungary’s EU funding and political participation in the Parliament, Council and similar institutions might be for the best. Not an expulsion, but basically telling them that until they get their shit together they won’t get to benefit from Union money or influence its direction

Whether there is the political will to achieve the required unanimity to effect expulsion remains unclear.

Does it remain unclear? Especially considering that the far right won a fairly large chunk of the Parliament seats in the latest election, it seems to me there has been comparatively very little interest in doing anything about Hungary or safeguarding Europe against autocracy

More AI you say? Can do!

Javascript bad.

Applause please.

Certainly not! Or other industries for that matter. It’s a good thing executives everywhere aren’t just concentrating on squeezing the maximum amount of money out of their companies and funneling it to themselves and their buddies on the board.

Sure, let’s “rightsize” the company by firing 20% of our workforce (but not management!) and raise prices 30%, and demand that the remaining employees maintain productivity at the level it used to be before we fucked things up. Oh and no raises for the plebs, we can’t afford it. Maybe a pizza party? One slice per employee though.

Not sure how this one slipped through.

I’d bet my ass this was caused by terrible practices brought on by suits demanding more “efficient” releases.

“Why do we do so much testing before releases? Have we ever had any problems before? We’re wasting so much time that I might not even be able to buy another yacht this year”

I’d rather be informed with a popup than have to remember to periodically check the settings in case they’ve maybe added dark mode. Tying this to “advertising tactics” is, well, ridiculous – they’re informing users about a new feature they might not otherwise learn about, not selling literally anything