Damn, I felt so sad typing that. If us 90's internet builders knew what we were pushing the world towards, I think many of us would have quit and become farmers.

I swear, on a busy week I had about 5 people reading that blog and they were all coworkers. The next day, I had a 6th visitor from Los Angeles and got excited. Who was this mysterious visitor? I found out when I opened my email and saw a C&D from Universal's lawyers saying I was abusing the trademark.

I blogged the next day, "Wtf, Universal?" and a few days later, got an email from the local celeb apologizing for the overzealous legal team. He was indeed totally cool about it.

It's also blue collar tech, thirty years old, was the first or second player in the market. It fell behind quickly, but served a niche. The market completely changed on them in the last 15 years or so, lots driven by private equity. The company never changed. Customers kept telling them the old "hookers and blow" sales pitches (literally) isn't going to win renewals and new customers, but they never listened, never fixed things. Now the new PE owners don't know what to do with this boondoggle that never made money.

I've always find it an interesting dichotomy between their public image, retail worker reputation, and corporate reputation. The former two are fantastic. I live in Seattle metro area where they are headquartered, and the last is horrible.

I've had more than one recruiter tell me it's a classic, blue collar, "we've always done it this way" environment since many of their corporate people rose through the ranks in stores, not tech. As I believe Warren Buffet put it, "every company is a tech company these days," so this creates problems. I met someone at a party there about three years ago tell me a data migration went so poorly, they'll have to use two financial systems for at least ten years because the previous system was homegrown with ancient tech.

As an ENTJ, the later would drive me crazy, and I've declined when recruiters want to talk to me about such and such manager position at Costco.

I looked at cosmetic repairability and battery replacement. All of them were impossible or near impossible to officially get non-electronic parts for. If you dig enough, you might be able to find sources for non-electronic parts.

For batteries, one or two, Focal Batys, I remember is one, had a battery swap program like Apple does. Some like Sony were quasi end-user serviceable. Some gave you like a $100-$150 credit on a new one if you sent the old one in. Bower Wilkins was the worst. If you needed repair or if your battery was dead, their response to me was, "We don't do that."

I found the whole thing hypocritical. All but one or two were based in Europe and touted sustainability commitments on their sites, but their replacement policies did not back it up.

The CSU system is going to have to to make tough consolidation decisions soon because you can't have declining urban and suburban campuses at the same time.

My experience with AI searches is that they'll still be wrong a lot of times, but it will condense/flatten the content generating trash sites and give me alternatives from these deeper results. What I'm looking for is usally in there.

For mainstream fans, the whole Star Wars franchise has been diluted with mediocre stories, I don't think they'd care. It's just another SW movie to watch.

That being said, this isn't the first time decannoizing the sequels has been brought up in a rumor. I wouldn't be surprised if this was just more wishful thinking.

Rian Johnson: "It's something that is absolutely going to be addressed... The other part of it is there are lots of surprises in this movie and lots of twists and turns, and I really want people to experience those when they see the movie for the first time. "

Ok, so years of oh, ah, and then the big lineage reveal comes and she's just a peasant girl. Screen rant called this "anticlimatic," which is was. The easily could have managed that earlier with a decent plot and decent writing, but the whole trilogy seemed to be written by a bunch of high school students.

Every single one of the blogspam sites (lifehacker, howtogeek, etc.) told you to use AFP/HFS+/Netatalk. I had so many problems with this. Time Machine would work well the first few times and then slow to a crawl. If there was a power outage, look out. The whole thing would be corrupted. It wasn't the network. FTP and scp worked just fine.

Eventually I found one blog that told you how to do it with SMB and ext4. It was that site that I learned about the much malignment of AFP and HFS+. SMB/ext4 worked like a charm. Six years later and not a single hiccup.

The harm was done by the groupthink and the sucking up of resources to research alternative causes. One of the comments on HN when that statnews article was first linked was by a commenter who worked on Alzheimer's. They agreed and I remember the line, (something to the effect of) "if you wanted funding for alternative investigations, you had to still throw a bone to beta amyloid in your proposal."

Was it all a waste? No. Current thought is beta amyloid is still involved, but Alzheimer's is multicausal. What those other causes are is in its investigation infancy. We could have started investigating those decades ago if the scientific research complex were truly open to new ideas.

I was at a panel last week. The most pro-AI person was an account executive from a big fintech company.

EVERYONE else - a data scientist that works in AI, regulatory compliance, cybersec, and marketing, took the position of "hey this is great and will change things, but let's pump the brakes... a lot."