Yup. I’m old enough to remember when the selling point of cable TV was that it was ad-free. Then, of course, they started adding ads. And then they sold us premium channels that didn’t have ads. Now those have ads, too. You just can’t get away from them.
I find it fascinating how media companies evolved their usage of ads over time. Used to be that the purpose of showing someone an ad was to get them to buy your product. Now, though, the companies who make the ads are paying to have them put on media networks who use the ads to annoy you into paying for a premium membership so you don’t have to see them. It’s double dipping.
Not sure how I would feel if I made an ad, and YouTube was saying to their users: “Yeah, you like that fucking ad? Super annoying, isn’t it? If you don’t pay me more money, I’m going to cram that annoying bullshit down your throat every time you want to watch a video. I’m going to put ads at the beginning of videos. I’m going to sprinkle them throughout the middle. Hell, I’m even going to make you watch ads after the video ends! You like that, you little bitch??”
I love SIGBOVIK - truly some insane projects are presented there. Like Tom Murphy’s projects of creating a hard drive from pings, or using AI to create uppest and lowest case letters. Or reverse emulating a Nintendo (which is a particular favorite of mine).
One other project that I really love was presented at the 2021 Sigbovik: Fontemon, created by Michael Mulet. It’s a full-blown choose-your-own-adventure game in a font. Truly insane. Here’s a short video showing the basics of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY1hDQMeU3A
Oh hey - catturd2; isn’t that that sycophantic piece of shit who fawns all over Elon Musk every chance he gets? Maybe it’s a different catturd2 on bluesky.
Edit: Actually, yeah; it does look like it’s a different person entirely:
I recently read Neil Stephenson’s book called “Fall”, in which a significant chunk of the novel is set about 30 years in the future. At that point in time, large swathes of America are referred to as “Ameristan”, because they are break-away territories ruled by evangelical warlords. It feels surprisingly prescient.
Ah, a fellow “Cracking the Cryptic” lover, I see.
A lot of sentences undergo startling shifts in mood if you add ‘like this one’ to the end, but high on the list is ‘I’m a neurologist studying dreams’.
I think if I hadn’t dropped Netflix when they did a 180 on their stance on password sharing, I would drop them now.
Ooh - very cool. A. baumanii is a really nasty little fucker. It’s the A in ESKAPE, a list comprised of the 6 most virulent and antibiotic resistant pathogens out there. A. baumanii is also sometimes referred to as Iraqibacter because of its prevalence in US military personnel returning from Iraq. It’s a soil-borne bacteria that was local to the middle east, but has now been spread around the world by hitchhiking in people. One of the main reasons why it’s so difficult to kill is that it is gram negative, which means that it has both an outer and inner membrane, which makes it difficult for existing classes of antibiotics to penetrate into the cell. Some of the other notable gram negative bacteria are E. coli, Y. pestis (the bacteria responsible for the black plague), and C. trachomatis, the bacteria responsible for chlamydia.
This study is pretty significant because, in addition to targeting a nasty little fucker, it’s possible that the approach used could be repurposed to target a number of that nasty little fucker’s nasty little family, too.
Well that’s not true. You’re very pro-genocide, as long as it’s against Palestinians. That’s pretty political.