God that’s fucking annoying. The other week I was listening to a podcast that also has episodes on YouTube. They were talking about farming and had to bleep the word ‘rapeseed’. The fuck are we doing guys.

You used to be able to watch beheadings online, now a farmer can’t even talk about his crops online without the censorship police getting involved…

In short, the complexity acted as a filter. It was a barrier to entry, which meant you had to be a bit of a nerd to get online. Back in the ‘90’s, people made fun of you for being an online nerd. But it also meant that the people who got online tended to be smarter. More educated.

The internet of the ‘90’s had a very nerdy culture. The worst debates were about Star Wars vs Star Trek. We disagreed on some things, but on the whole it was ‘us nerds’ online.

Now that we made it this easy, there’s no longer a filter: you can find anyone and everyone online. Including some folks who can’t really handle this much freedom without being assholes with it. The web also gravitated towards bigger platforms which, ironically, have much less of a community feel than the old web. In the 90’s, I knew everyone on a forum by name. But on a subreddit with a million people, there’s no real ‘community’.

The web these days is also overrun with politics, which simply wasn’t a thing back in say, 1995.

I’m an 80’s kid. We had to learn everything: MS-DOS, Windows, how to install OS’s and software, serial ports, etc. Nothing was easy or convenient. You had to LEARN how and why things worked if you wanted to run games and things.

My dad never used any of our actual PC’s. He wouldn’t know which way to hold the mouse, much less anything else. We tried to teach him, but he just couldn’t grasp any of the fundamentals.

But with an iPad? That’s easy. It just works. He can e-mail, do Facebook, watch YouTube or other streaming…

Point is: we made shit way too accessible and convenient. Kids never have to learn anything anymore. So they don’t. We literally had to teach interns the basics of working with a desktop; all they’ve ever used was an iPad and phone.

It also lead to the destruction of the old web. Back in the early to late ‘90’s, you had to be a nerd to use it. To WANT to use it even. But now that it’s so easy and convenient even my completely tech illiterate dad can get online, things have turned to shit. We never should’ve made it this convenient.

Yep. It was pretty wild that some people actually fell for the Palestine argument. That was only really an issue for a very small minority of the left. Most average Americans couldn’t find it on a map, much less a reason to give a shit about it.

Ultimately, it wasn’t even necessary to try and fracture the left with the Palestine argument. It was already fractured enough that she never stood a chance.

Even in a fairly normal race, it’s silly to think voters would care more about people half a world away, rather than the issues they’re dealing with themselves like the high cost of living, housing shortages, etc.

Well if you look at his musical career, it’s relatively short prior to 1987. So not really.

He started singing in a church choir when he was 10. He played drums in some local bands and left school at 16. He started playing drums for bands that played clubs. In 1985, he became lead singer for the soul band FBI and was noticed by a record producer. His first real songs were singig on ‘Let It Be’ by a charity group Ferry Aid, after the Zeebrugge ferry disaster. That was march 1987. Followed that up by a duet with Lisa Fabien in may. And in august 1987 Never Gonna Give You Up was released, which he’d actually recorded on january 1 st that year.

It’s certainly… not common for someone to go from ‘shy guy playing drums in a nightclub band’ to having a chart topping hit in 25 countries in less than five years. He managed to actually have a pretty good career after that, though none of his work will ever reach the lofty heights of Never Gonna Give You Up in terms of sheer popularity. And the fact that the song managed to be a hit, disappear, and come back ten times as strong because of a joke is like a fluke on top of a fluke.

1987 to be precise. It was quite a popular song when it was released; it was a chart topper in 25 countries. It was played for weeks on the radio and the single sold like hot cakes.

What’s even wilder: it was Rick Astley’s first solo hit. He had done duets and sang on other people’s tracks, but that was his first single from his debut studio album. And it went straight to the fucking moon.

He had a fair few hits and ‘retired’ in 1993. He was 27 at the time! He returned in 2000, and in 2007 the rickroll became a thing. And the rest you know.

As an 80’s kid, you can imagine it was wild to see kids using one of my favorite songs ever as a meme. I’m just glad Astley himself took the jokes in a good nature and is enjoying his continued career because of it. Gotta be even stranger for him to see the song get back to this level of popularity well over 20 years post release because of a dumb internet joke.

Yep. If you’re on the internet for long enough, you pretty much develop a sixth sense for when you’re being rickrolled. As soon as I saw that ‘Never’ fit, I knew what was up.

Since Americans basically stole every tradition they have from someone else, I’m not gonna worry about their opinion on them :D

The US is a toddler when it comes to history and traditions. I drive by a church that was built in the year 900. That one’s actually called the ‘new church’ since it replaced one from the year 400. That’s history. And we’ve got traditions that go back centuries further.

Just because Americans prefer watered down, tame versions of our European traditions, doesn’t mean the rest of us are going to follow. Krampus, Sunneklaas, Sinterklaas and other traditions are here to stay.

I did that test late last year, and repeated it with another town this summer to see if it had improved. Granted, it made less mistakes - but still very annoying ones. Like placing a tourist info at a completely incorrect, non-existent address.

I assume your result also depends a bit on what town you try. I doubt it has really been trained with information pertaining to a city of 160.000 inhabitants in the Netherlands. It should do better with the US I’d imagine.

The problem is it doesn’t tell you it has knowledge gaps like that. Instead, it chooses to be confidently incorrect.

You know, just for you: I just changed it to the Coca Cola santa :D

Ugh. Don’t get me started.

Most people don’t understand that the only thing it does is ‘put words together that usually go together’. It doesn’t know if something is right or wrong, just if it ‘sounds right’.

Now, if you throw in enough data, it’ll kinda sorta make sense with what it writes. But as soon as you try to verify the things it writes, it falls apart.

I once asked it to write a small article with a bit of history about my city and five interesting things to visit. In the history bit, it confused two people with similar names who lived 200 years apart. In the ‘things to visit’, it listed two museums by name that are hundreds of miles away. It invented another museum that does not exist. It also happily tells you to visit our Olympic stadium. While we do have a stadium, I can assure you we never hosted the Olympics. I’d remember that, as i’m older than said stadium.

The scary bit is: what it wrote was lovely. If you read it, you’d want to visit for sure. You’d have no clue that it was wholly wrong, because it sounds so confident.

AI has its uses. I’ve used it to rewrite a text that I already had and it does fine with tasks like that. Because you give it the correct info to work with.

Use the tool appropriately and it’s handy. Use it inappropriately and it’s a fucking menace to society.

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

‘Serving sizes’ are absolute nonsense. They are always wildly out of step with reality. Only reason they put it on there is so manufacturers can claim “our product isn’t bad, it only contains X calories per serving”.

Meanwhile, they put serving sizes fit for ants on packages that clearly aren’t meant to be shared and don’t reflect reasonable consumption. For example, a serving size of three jelly beans is silly by any stretch of the imagination. So is putting ‘serving sizes’ on a soda can. And a sleeve of Oreos? One cookie is a serving. Yeah, we all know that’s not how you eat Oreos…

Preferably out the back of a C130 just off the coast of Florida.

I don’t smell burnt toast, but clearly I’ve had a stroke if that’s supposed to be readable.

Unfortunately I don’t have it anymore or I’d post it for sure :D I took it years ago on an ancient iPod Touch that now has a spicy pillow for a battery and is completely dead.

He was (but not always, as I’ve learned). He first appeared in 1963 and had his own comic, Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Fury,_Agent_of_S.H.I.E.L.D.

And yes, agreed on Simmons and Jackman. Also, we obviously can’t forget RDJ as Tony Stark. An actor so perfectly cast, he basically launched the entire MCU. If it had been anyone else in that role, I feel confident in saying that it would’ve fizzled out long before we’d ever get to an Endgame.

TIL; thank you! I was aware enough of the comics to know of white Fury, but didn’t know there is, in fact, a black Fury.

Your boss is an idiot. I’m white as printer paper and would gladly let SLJ play me in a biopic. Because he’s awesome in every role he’s played. Good actors are good actors.

Correct. Nobody was bothered by Nick Fury’s change for example, even though he went from white to black. That was a wholly unknown character for most Marvel moviegoers. And Samuel L. Jackson is awesome in that role.

I forgot LEGO; that’s also one of them :D

You should buy a Lamy Safari fountain pen and a Casio GW-M5610U if you’re ever inclined to try those hobbies ;-)