I suppose they meant that it slows down their internet, not the internet

The Usenet post I linked to claims it’s originally from the 1st quarter of 1990, but who knows if that’s accurate or not. I actually can’t find a good source for whether Stumpf is the original author or just the one who posted it to rec.humor.funny.reruns, but it’s usually attributed to him at any rate.

But yeah, fairly ancient by internet standards. I remember first running into it in the 90’s

Some plans less so than others.

Also, I like this framing of users as the enemy. Matches my experience, really.

Wasn’t expecting a fucking rainforest

Orders a

Meaning that he knows he’s sharing bullshit

You sure he’s getting hoodwinked and not sharing shit he knows is fake on purpose?

Stalin was nominated twice

The program’s path from a CP/M app by MicroPro onward is winding, being shoved into a half-baked office suite, acquired by SoftKey, which became the Learning Company, acquired by Mattel, spun off to Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep, and is now the archival property of—well, nobody’s quite sure.

Looking forward to the eventual frivolous takedown notice and/or lawsuit – suits seem to have absolutely zero brains when it comes to this stuff. Or, well, when it comes to anything except making themselves and their buddies on the board richer, really

It just irritates the fuck out of me when people write an obvious swear word but either omit letters or “censor” them with eg. *, like that somehow makes it not swearing even though EVERYBODY KNOWS WHAT THAT FUCKING WORD IS.

Either don’t swear if you think it’s so bad, or just write the naughty words out instead of pretending “f*ck” isn’t a bad evil naughty word because you hid one letter like a fucking mentally deficient child.

FUCK.

Hah, huge surprise that this was their reaction. Garbage product made by a garbage company run by garbage people.

maybe they could improve the search results in general

They have no incentive to do that. What they do have an incentive for is showing you a lot of bullshit results that also conveniently happen to use their ad network, so you have to click on multiple pages and see more ads before finding what you were looking for.

More AI you say? Can do!

Ah surprising that Poland’s still got copyright laws that relaxed, I thought they’d been more or less harmonized in the whole EU. Finland’s laws used to be pretty much like what you describe too, but they were changed… uh, fuck, I think 10 – 20 years ago to be stricter and I have a vague memory that they claimed it was to be more in line with how most other countries are in the EU, but it’s very much possible that either the politicians behind this lied, or that I remember wrong

That’d depend on your local copyright laws, but it’s probably illegal.

Getting caught without your friend calling the cops on you is extremely unlikely, at least assuming you don’t do anything fantastically stupid

Javascript bad.

Applause please.

Certainly not! Or other industries for that matter. It’s a good thing executives everywhere aren’t just concentrating on squeezing the maximum amount of money out of their companies and funneling it to themselves and their buddies on the board.

Sure, let’s “rightsize” the company by firing 20% of our workforce (but not management!) and raise prices 30%, and demand that the remaining employees maintain productivity at the level it used to be before we fucked things up. Oh and no raises for the plebs, we can’t afford it. Maybe a pizza party? One slice per employee though.

Not sure how this one slipped through.

I’d bet my ass this was caused by terrible practices brought on by suits demanding more “efficient” releases.

“Why do we do so much testing before releases? Have we ever had any problems before? We’re wasting so much time that I might not even be able to buy another yacht this year”

Conservatism is a plague of death.

As long as we keep pretending conservatism is a valid political ideology, nobody is going to be safe

I’d rather be informed with a popup than have to remember to periodically check the settings in case they’ve maybe added dark mode. Tying this to “advertising tactics” is, well, ridiculous – they’re informing users about a new feature they might not otherwise learn about, not selling literally anything