Today, Gene Fourney is the CEO of IT company TechnologyWest in Denver. I thought this story wouldn’t be complete unless I made an attempt to contact him. I emailed him, asking him some questions about NetWorks at the time, but he wasn’t interested in reminiscing. “I’m not revisiting an issue that you may have experienced in 1998 with Networks,” Fourney wrote. “Times are dramatically different in 2023 than they were in 1998. Not sure why anyone would have an interest in revisiting 28K dialup days of 1998.”

Lmao, what is wrong with this guy? I found this whole article to be humorous and light and it was a fun look back on the old days. Tons of people have an “interest in revisiting it”.

Given his location it strikes me that I have a solid chance of actually meeting this guy in person and sussing out why he’s such a no-fun prick.

Defederation from this garbage ass instance when?

One of my favorite takes to throw out at random is “The Grateful Dead was the greatest country band of all time”.

Now I’ll admit I mostly say it to wind people up, but I don’t not believe it, either. It hinges on two things: most people don’t really think of country music as having bands (even when the singer, of course, has a backing band) and I think Workingman’s Dead is a genuinely great all-time country album. American Beauty crossed genres a little harder but it has its bona fide country moments too.

What I’ll say is - if you always dismissed the Dead as “17 minutes of masturbation via the electric guitar” (and you’re not wrong either), at least give Workingman’s Dead a spin. The tracks clock in at standard radio play length and I think it will give you a different perspective. If you still don’t like it, fair enough.

Spotify is a publicly traded company. Their financial reports are required to be audited every single year. They really are losing money. There’s no way around that.

The studios, most of which are also publicly traded, report billions of dollars in profit every year. Hollywood accounting is about using shell companies to move money around (back to the main studio) while ensuring that nobody ever gets paid out on the profits of the movie by the LLC they set up to produce the movie.

I finally got out of accounting. It’s really hard to commit fraud at any scale when you’re a publicly traded and audited company. People are gonna call bullshit on that but I’m serious. I would be in favor of requiring every “small business” to be audited on a regular basis because I don’t know the exact percentage but I would testify in front of Congress right now that easily over 50% of all the small business clients I ever had were committing fraud somewhere.

One case that comes to mind is a guy with a small construction company who had funneled over a half a million dollars to his personal house, calling it business expenses. I took this to my boss - who signed a code of professional ethics and has a professional license on the line - and their reply was “he’s defrauding the government out of about a quarter million dollars but we’re not the accounting police and that’s why we don’t sign his tax returns.”

Yeah it’s like when you hear about playing baby shark 24/7 at a volume to deprive people of sleep and some people are like “hahaha baby shark isn’t that funny” but you can pick any song in the world and if you play it long enough, loud enough, keeping people from sleeping, they will go absolutely clinically insane.

efficiency is when you have to recall your cars the most out of anybody because it’s more efficient to get them out the door and in to the suckers customers hands and then fix them later

I’ll be praying for you when the wave of recalls start coming out

I’d really love to know what the percentage is that is or is at risk of truly being lost - this article just completely ignores that piracy exists. Maybe you can’t buy game boy games or Metal Gear or Unreal Tournament anymore but the idea that they are inaccessible is just plainly wrong. I guess you probably can’t advertise that in business insider (if only to prevent some ridiculous lawsuit from Nintendo) but it changes this number drastically.

I actually do remember stuff from the 90s and 2000s that’s truly lost, and it’s a damn shame, but the black flag will always provide.

I’m going to assume that 4g works decently enough where you are at this point. Much the same thing happened during the 4g rollout - it was too sparse, the phone spent too many resources hunting for a 4g signal when 3g was right there. You end up with a less stable connection because it’s constantly bouncing back and forth.

I think if you look up how to disable 5g on whatever phone you have (which is possible on any phone) and stick to 4g for now you’ll find the performance is as good as ever - if not better, with some of the load from other users being pushed to 5g.

I worked for “a major phone company” when 4g was rolling out. It’s unfortunate during this period, but I don’t know how you prevent it. 5g will objectively be better for 99.9% of users at some point - it might not be now, but everyone has to sell a 5g phone to “future proof” and have another selling feature. I wish the companies would educate people a little more on the rollout but then you’re basically telling them “this thing we’re selling you isn’t really ready yet”. And I mean, if you live in a major city, it’s working just fine… but not everybody does.

Remember that time he said he was going to solve the COVID ventilator crisis and sent out a bunch of obsolete overstock sleep apnea machines that nobody wanted and weren’t actually useful for the purpose? That was a good time.

speak for yourself

I guess at the core of this, we are afraid of ourselves. We are afraid that the worste of humanity outpaces the better parts, that the inputs and training aren’t altruistic but are more pointedly “bad” or “wrong”, and thus leading to “harmful”, whether through misinformation, lies, or fabrications.

Is there any reason not to be afraid? I think you could say that Tay was essentially the same idea a few years back and it took like 48 hours loose on the internet for it to spout literal Nazi (1930s-40s German NSDAP) rhetoric. Besides that being a PR disaster - if “AI” is only getting stronger and more integrated into human life and society, that can be pretty problematic.

Gambling addiction - a rather well documented phenomenon over centuries - wasn’t even in the DSM until the fifth edition. Gaming addiction will be in the sixth. See you then.

I did bother to read it. Did you? Just because it hasn’t been fully fleshed out to be officially listed with diagnostic criteria and full information for the manual doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been defined or that it doesn’t exist or that the APA does not classify it as a mental disorder.

Do you have some kind of ideological problem with the concept of gaming addiction, specifically, in the universe of all the other behavioral addictions out there? Gamers™ sure do seem to get sensitive any time anyone says anything that could be construed as remotely negative about their hobby - like that some people develop crippling addictions to it as outlined in the topic article.

It’s in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - THE authoritative guide on what is or is not considered a mental disorder, yes.

This is hardly groundbreaking stuff - people can be addicted to porn, food, exercise, pretty much anything. Really the primary criteria in calling any addiction a “disorder” is “what negative effects is it having on your life?” Well, “I literally want to kill myself when my parents cut off the wifi” is a pretty negative effect.

I think both of your points are correct but a lot of celebrity types write straight up essays attached to some of their pictures - it’s like where they get out everything they can’t fit into 280 characters.

Will we ever be far enough removed from the pandemic that we can talk about how the federal government lied and ignored 100+ years worth of science on the efficacy of masking (including effective mask mandates during the “Spanish”/Kansas flu pandemic), without being accused of being an antivax conspiracy theorist?

I’m vaxed, waxed and ready to party, but it is a stone cold fact that they told people not to wear masks - and caused untold numbers of deaths - because they didn’t want the general public to reduce the current supply.

(Fauci also did an absolutely horrendous, I mean historically awful job dealing with the AIDS crisis, but I guess that’s for another time.)

You wouldn’t believe how many people thanked me as they walked into the store and took off their mask after seeing one man simply dissenting against the bullshit.

More and more people are saying it, folks

This is interesting. I don’t think any really productive debate is going to come out of this - it’ll be the same one that’s been rehashed a million times - but it’s hard to say “be a parent and control what your children do” when they’re literally running away from home and threatening suicide when the parents try to parent.

I suppose if nothing else, hopefully we get more research and support services for these extreme cases of behavioral addiction.

Dana Gonzalez, who spoke in favor of withdrawing from the ALA, said the commission “ought not promote, celebrate or support what scripture condemns” and then quoted Bible scriptures that she said condemned what Drabinski wrote in her tweet, according to the Daily Montanan.

Ah, there it is. You have it served up to you on a silver platter - a literal self proclaimed Marxist - you know, the thing they claim that everyone to the left of Mussolini is, and they skip that and go straight for the gay angle.