He probably gave them a membership to the jelly of the month club instead of a Christmas bonus.

Windows Sound Recorder used to open literally anything - text documents, pdfs, images, executables, DLLs, and attempt to play them as audio. Photoshop files make especially interesting noises through it. I used to use it for samples. Got some great noisy stuff that way.

The CEO "apologized" this morning (after being duly chastised, I'm sure):

Hi all, last night, a post from last year from my personal X account suddenly became a topic of discussion here on Reddit. I want to share a few thoughts on this to provide clarity to the community on what is Proton's policy on politics going forward.

First, while the X post was not intended to be a political statement, I can understand how it can be interpreted as such, and it therefore should not have been made. While we will not prohibit all employees from expressing personal political opinions publicly, it is something I will personally avoid in the future. I lean left on some issues, and right on other issues, but it doesn't serve our mission to publicly debate this. It should be obvious, but I will say that it is a false equivalence to say that agreeing with Republicans on one specific issue (antitrust enforcement to protect small companies) is equal to endorsing the entire Republican party platform.

Second, officially Proton must always be politically neutral, and while we may share facts and analysis, our policy going forward will be to share no opinions of a political nature. The line between facts, analysis, and opinions can be blurry at times, but we will seek to better clarify this over time through your feedback and input.

The exception to these rules is on the topics of privacy, security, and freedom. These are necessarily political topics, where influencing public policy to defend these values, often requires engaging politically.

The operations of Proton have always reflected our neutrality. For example, recently we refused pressure to deplatform both Palestinian student groups and Zionist student groups, not because we necessarily agreed with their views, but because we believe more strongly in their right to have their own views.

It is also a legal guarantee under Swiss law, which explicitly prohibits us from assisting foreign governments or agencies, and allows us no discretion to show favoritism as Swiss law and Swiss courts have the final say.

The promise we make is that no matter your politics, you will always be welcome at Proton (subject of course to adherence to our terms and conditions). When it comes to defending your right to privacy, Proton will show no favoritism or bias, and will unconditionally defend it irrespective of the opinions you may hold.

This is because both Proton as a company, and Proton as a community, is highly diverse, with people that hold a wide range of opinions and perspectives. It's important that we not lose sight of nuance. Agreeing/disagreeing with somebody on one point, rarely means you agree/disagree with them on every other point.

I would like to believe that as a community there is more that unites us than divides us, and that privacy and freedom are universal values that we can all agree upon. This continues to be the mission of the non-profit Proton Foundation, and we will strive to carry it out as neutrally as possible.

Going forward, I will be posting via u/andy1011000. Thank you for your feedback and inputs so far, and we look forward to continuing the conversation.

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/...

Am I being paranoid when I notice that the binary at the end of his username translates to 88?

I had a friend who sent me a "Y2K fix" program back in '99. Said it would patch the error so I'd be safe. When I ran it, it swapped the letters Y and K on my keyboard.

Well, how about that. Trump did drain part of the swamp.

Ah, good. So the corrupt, evil, and greedy tactics of health insurers are finally mitigated to... checks notes oh, to what they were last week.

You know they're sitting on a wish list of awful policies while they're waiting for this to blow over so they can implement them when we aren't looking. Fuck that.

I'm Buddhist, and it's always struck me as odd that so many religious people require their text to be literally true.

If it were to be definitively proven that the person called Jesus Christ never existed as a historical person on earth, the various Christian churches and organizations would stop at nothing to attempt to discredit this. They would be furious.

On the other hand, if it were definitively proven that Siddartha Gautama, the person who will be called the Buddha, never existed as a historical person on earth, most Buddhists would find it interesting, probably even humorous, and would go on happily practicing Buddhism.

It was an election season where the race was polling around 50/50 pretty much throughout. Even when one candidate had a lead, with margins of error, no they didn't. A ~50% probability of losing is huge, even if many polls did show her slightly ahead. Consider a 20-sided die. 9 sides are red, 11 are blue. You wouldn't be surprised if you rolled red.

News media has no idea how to talk about polls because they don't want to talk about probability, they want to talk about which number is bigger as if it's a scoreboard. I didn't want him to win, but the polls weren't wrong.

I do most of my work at the command line, my co-workers do think I'm nuts for doing it, but one of our recent projects required us all to log into a client's systems, and a significant portion of the tasks must be done via bash prompt. Suddenly, I'm no longer the team weirdo, I'm a subject matter expert.

As an Old, I started with an Apple ][ and learned BASIC. We did get the classic B&W Macintosh computers when I was 12-13.

Not only did he steal it from Heinlein, the part that makes me irrationally angry is that he claimed the term came from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I know you know this and likely just mistyped, but for clarity, the Iliad is about the war itself. The Odyssey is about the dude trying to get back home.

They weren't religious texts per se, but they were certainly cultural touchstones which contain important lessons about the human condition, death, love, and what's truly important in life. They would fill a role similar to histories in the Old Testament, probably, like the book of Ruth.

Titanic nerd here. There are definitely lessons that we've still not learned. Greed and hubris are easily spotted, but the more insidious enemy that doomed Titanic was complacency. In 1912 there was a real sentiment that man was the master of the universe, that war was a thing of the past, that modern science made ships practically unsinkable... none of that was true, of course.

Jack Thayer, a survivor, later wrote about how the Titanic sinking presaged a sea change in the world, and not for the better:

"There was peace and the world had an even tenor to its way. Nothing was revealed in the morning the trend of which was not known the night before. It seems to me that the disaster about to occur was the event that not only made the world rub its eyes and awake, but woke it with a start, keeping it moving at a rapidly accelerating pace ever since with less and less peace, satisfaction and happiness. To my mind the world of today awoke April 15th, 1912"

I have the album I made with them! Some of the tracks are solely composed of Sound Recorder playing non-audio files, but every track contains samples created that way. The quality isn't the best, this is a CD rip because I've long since lost the original files, but since it's experimental industrial noise, the audio quality doesn't hurt much I guess.

https://soundcloud.com/...

I have a Unihertz Titan and love it. I guess they skirted around the keyboard patent. https://www.unihertz.com/products/titan

Pretty optimistic of you to think there will still be humans in 8,000 years.

Counterpoint: Nah, let 'em burn.

When do we get to the part of the episode where James T Kirk, prime directive be damned, finds the meglomaniacal computer controlling these men, and blows it up?

Not surprising, what else do you expect him to eat?

Here's a weird question: do you have a gallbladder? People without a gallbladder tend to have that experience with edibles, or need a higher dose to get an effect.