blivet

This is really well thought out. There was something that always bugged me about BSG that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and you explained what it was quite nicely.

Reddit’s value has never been in the “average redditor” or the “popular subs”. The real value is in the niche tail of communities and the fact that they have such a massive amount of people that even if “only” 10% of their users were decent people, it still meant that they had enough decent people to talk with something to contribute.

Yeah, I don’t use Reddit any longer, but it was really great that there were active subs devoted to incredibly obscure topics. If you wanted to talk about something, chances were that thousands of other people did too.

Yes, that’s pretty much where I’m at.

If the quality of AI-generated content degrades to the point where it’s useless that is also fine with me.

So in order for data to be useful to AIs, AI-generated content will have to be flagged as such. Sounds good to me.

I was thinking pretty much the same thing. He’s got the sensibility of a teenage boy. He thinks things like the letter X and the color black are totally cool, and he thinks naming his company “Space-Sex” and one of its spacecraft “Big Fuckin’ Rocket” is the height of humor.

I get the feeling that both the original and the sequel are the kind of film where word of mouth just doesn’t do it for some reason. I had a friend years ago who mentioned that she had never seen Blade Runner, and immediately followed that by saying not to bother telling her how good it was.

Blade Runner. It did very poorly at the box office, and the critics were lukewarm at best, but I loved it. I was a big fan of Philip K. Dick, so a film by Ridley Scott based on one of his novels was right up my alley. I dragged my friend to see it the week it came out, and I was blown away. Even back then I wasn’t alone. It almost immediately became a cult film that regularly played in smaller repertory theaters.

I remember reading an interview with Arthur C. Clarke back then where he mentioned that he had recently spoken with Stanley Kubrick, and Kubrick had said that Blade Runner was the most visually beautiful film he had ever seen.

Up to a point. Google+ was invite only for so long that by the time it became available to the general public no one cared anymore. When people signed in with their new accounts they couldn’t find anyone they knew, and they never came back.

Really stupid on Google’s part, because they launched at a time when people were angry with Facebook for selling private user data, and a lot of users probably would have moved to G+ if they had been able to.

Yes, I signed in out of curiosity, and I was completely disoriented because there was no feed of just the people I followed. I kept clicking around, thinking I was missing something obvious.

That’s just privacy protection. I own a few domains, and none of the whois information points to me personally.

Yes, the name of the company, the logo, and the idea of “tweets” are all a charming evocation of a world filled with brief messages. Twitter has problems, but branding isn’t one of them.

I think we are in the midst of a worldwide epidemic of mental illness, and even the wealthiest and most powerful are not immune.

Yeah, by the end of the story all the characters had been shown to be so awful that I didn’t care what happened to any of them.

Same here. I feel the same way about a lot of New Wave SF from that era. I like J.G. Ballard because he’s such a strong writer that he can pull off that sort of plotless “experimental” stuff, but the rest of them don’t do it for me. Why would I want to read an SF writer trying to write like William S. Burroughs when I can just read William S. Burroughs?

I’m grateful to this strip because reading it caused me to learn the correct spelling of “abstruse”. I’ve never heard anyone say the word, and for some reason I had always read it as “abtruse”, without the first S.

I agree with your points about ease of use, but even back when ISPs provided Usenet access, it was still pretty niche. Most people weren’t even aware that it existed. It was covered in the old “Internet for Dummies” sorts of books back in the 90s, but I’ve never met anyone IRL who used it, not even back when I worked at a university.

Also, purely from a mechanical standpoint, her character’s goal is effectively to prevent the premise of the story from playing out, which is the exact opposite of what the viewers want.

I haven’t had live TV in years and it’s quite shocking to see what the average user deals with. Junk TV + ads that play 30% of the time is absolutely insane.

Yeah, I’ve had the same experience. We don’t have live TV, and when we occasionally hang out with friends or family who do I’m always flabbergasted at the frequency and length of ad breaks nowadays, and similarly amazed that despite a nearly endless list of channels there never seems to be anything I actively want to watch.

I’m not seeing any font tags, sonny. You can’t have a real web page without <FONT FACE="Verdana" SIZE="3" COLOR="red">Welcome!</FONT>