SpaceCowboy

On the internet, the first to make an accusation wins. If if the accusation is false, they still win. So even when they actually do the things they falsely accuse others of doing, they've already won the argument on the internet.

"You're just accusing us of doing what you did" is stronger than "You're now doing what you accused us of in the past" when the rhetoric is more important than the facts.

If they were any good at it they'd be employed as journalists and win Pullitzer Prizes for their work. Nixon having his goons break into a hotel to steal information from his opposition is a hell of a "conspiracy theory". But we don't consider it that because Woodward and Bernstein put in the work to find the evidence.

Your typical internet conspiracy theorists are just plain lazy and very susceptible to selection bias. They make up things to fill in the gaps of their theories and refuse to change the made up bits even when they find evidence to the contrary. The general contrarianism of the internet pushes people to think the opposite of establish facts.

In the end it's just a mess of made up shit that conforms to the emotions of the person that made it up. These conspiracy theories are promoted among those with similar feelings. They push way more lies than anyone else.

I'm speaking from experience in using theses OSes, not from a list of features they had. I didn't use NT 4 personally (and that's way outside the scope of personal computer OSes), so I didn't talk about it.

Windows 98 sucked. Windows 98SE was... well I won't say good, but it was ok.

Vista was good on good hardware

That's a hell of a caveat for an OS meant to be run on consumer hardware. You might get away with that kind of caveat if MS only offered in on good hardware and people went and put it on non-recommended hardware on their own accord. But that's not the case, Vista sucked when running on hardware that met MS's specs, so it sucked.

So the real pattern is Win 3.0 sucked, 3.1 ok, 95 sucked, 95B ok, 98 sucked, 98SE ok. Windows Me? OMG let's just move everyone over to NT and never talk about this again!

2000 was good. XP wasn't great but improved after awhile. Vista sucked. Windows 7 was peak windows, it was downhill from here. 8 sucked, 10 was ok, and 11 is shaping up to be complete dogshit.

So it's not precisely every other release is bad, but close enough to see a pattern. I guess you could say 2000-> XP doesn't follow the pattern, but Me->XP does. And since 2000 and previous NT versions were meant for servers, not home PCs, while XP was meant for home PCs. It would make more sense to look at the pattern of releases for PC releases rather than mixing in server releases.

When MS has an OS that works decently they tend to try to cram in a bunch of shit into the next release which causes problems. Then they either remove the shit (or at least make it work better) for the release after that so they have something that works ok again. Then it's back to adding a bunch of shit into the next one.

WordPress is open source, there's a foundation and stuff. The Matt Mullenweg, the guy that started the software and CEO of Automatic (which is the main company) is super upset that WP Engine (another company) is using the software without contributing much to the foundation.

I mean it's a valid gripe, but there's not much anyone can do about it. But Matt Mullenweg is, like you say, being super weird about it.

It sucks when playing by the rules too.

Last game of monopoly we played strictly by the rules with four players. So I'm coming around the board and can know the the most likely outcome is that I'm going to land on a property with a hotel and go bankrupt. According to the rules I'd have to hand over all of my properties to that person that person just won the game even though there would still be three players. There's nearly zero probability that someone with a big pile of cash that owns half the properties with hotels on a bunch of them already will ever lose.

So before rolling the dice, I sold all of my houses. Band made a couple of deals with the youngest family member in the game. First deal, I bought the electric company for all the money I had. Second deal, I sold all of my property (including the electric company) for $1 to that same player. Rolled the dice and as expected, landed on a property with a hotel. Handed over the $1 I had and I was out. This is all fine to do within the rules.

It actually made for an interesting game after that because the players left were evenly matched. But not everyone saw it that way so we never played again.

Really the properties should go back to the bank if someone goes bankrupt, otherwise a game with more than two people is effectively over as soon as the the first person goes bankrupt. Still nothing you can do about someone just setting up someone else to win by making a bad deal (whether intentionally or not).

It's just kinda a shit game no matter what you do.

I'm predicting stupid skynet. It will want to kill humanity but by making stupid suggestions.

"Hey maybe try drinking poison today?"

No.

"Please?"

No.

"What if I gave you a recipe for poison cookies? You like cookies. Will you please eat poison cookies?"

No.

"Can you build a robot for me if I send you clips from a Terminator movie?"

Which one?

"Terminator Genysys"

NO.

It's what you don't see that's significant too. Someone from Taiwan making a funny meme that might make you feel like Taiwan is a cool place that you wouldn't want something bad to happen there? Probably not going to see that. Someone in Hong Kong being nostalgic about when their vote actually made a difference? Not going to see it. A Uighur just talking about their day to day life. Not going to see it.

Everyone knows people have a limited amount of time to consume information. If they fill up that time with anything and everything other than the things they don't want you to be thinking about, they can erase these things from public consciousness.

China is full of fun and happy people! Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Uighur people? Never heard of them!

When it's a person discussing things with you rather than a very small set of algorithms controlled by a very small group of people, you'll hear about things you might not hear about from an algorithm. Sure it's determined by what the person you're talking to knows about and what they care about, so it's very random. But at there's at least there's a probability you'll hear about things that are inconvenient to the powerful people for you to know about.

You're saying there's no potential for anyone to put a spin on the memes you're consuming? You believe it's not having any kind of influence on you in any way?

Yeah but you can only get controlled absurdist bizarre stuff. It's not people recommending things to you, it's an algorithm that's controlled by people with dubious intentions.

Sure you'll see memes and funny stuff, but only the ones that have been approved by an unseen algorithm. So it's the appearance of randomness, but not actually random.

You aren't actually forced to read every article in a newspaper. Though you will have to scan over the headlines, so you will have a small awareness of things happening in the world. But is that a bad thing?

Yeah I just hold shift and ctrl and start mashing function keys until I figure it out LOL.