Vernor Vinge, patron saint of the singularity and noted winner of a couple of libertarian fiction awards, has passed. HN wanted a black bar[1] but were denied. They compensated by posting a lot of bad takes.

Submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775304

'jart (aka Justine) has this to say about the impending Singularity (feat. Trump and Twitter!):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39777929

This hackernews wishes he has been frozen, to be thawed in the future (for some reason, no-one expects the future to be Idiocracy):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776217

[1] when a notable person in CS dies there’s sometimes a black bar under the HN header

remember when Tea Partiers were teabagging?

is ok i can be squidward too

Internet weirdo to salt-of-the-earth Midwesterners: at least you’re all not cucks!

SotEMW: cucks?

IW: you know, like that porn where a white dude watches black dudes fuck his wife!

SotEMW: <racks shotgun slide> get the hell away from my daughter

relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2909/

OK thanks all for the updates. I was aware of most of them. It’s been quiet around him in the venues I frequent. I’d like to think it’s because most people recognize he’s not well and it’s punching down to make fun of him.

'zactly

you can go all pseudo-evolutionary and argue that the Midwest is bland and unadventurous because all the people with vim and drive fucked off to the coasts to bang “art hoes” and make money, leaving only the tillers of the soil left to breed among themselves. But that would upset his bizarre ideas of white people sticking to themselves.

He’s more of a rootless cosmopolitan than he perhaps cares to realize.

I believe you meant to write “delicious”

I reacted to that too, “no need to be an overt WN now that society accepts us!” but I think that’s partly bravado.

For example, he loves Twitter now but Elon still hasn’t given his account back…

Yes there are, or were. The OG Nazis treated Dutch POWs slightly better than French ones, for instance.

OK thanks for pointing out the LGBT spiderweb icon, I’ll look for that for a slightly more reliable indicator of non-localness (bearing in mind the sister comment from @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de).

An aside, I can see that both commentators in this thread who have kbin.social handles don’t have fully qualified handles. Is that because kbin.social is somehow more federated than other instances?

I’ve been using the presence of a domain in handles to quickly check if the commenter has an account here or is a drive-by.

Oh god what did Dreher do now? Last I heard he was divorced and living in Budapest.

Can launder money in multiple jurisdictions.

Deadtree and in Swedish: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52641078-under-st-veln-norge-1940-1945

According to Wonkette, they’re now in danger of deportation because they don’t know any Russian, and don’t seem interested in learning it

https://www.wonkette.com/p/canadian-idiots-who-fled-to-russia

I just read an account of the Nazi occupation of Norway in WW2 and it was a bit like that. The local Nazis (the OG Quisling!) were widely hated, there was passive resistance at every turn, and very few Norwegians were interested in some sort of “racial bond” with Germany.

The remarks at the end on how EA is actively trying to recruit and convert young uni students to their cause is chilling.

Re: Lemmy, some dude (ofc) is trying to start a new “decentralized” Wikipedia, and he touts as a merit that he created Lemmy:

I have worked on Lemmy for the past four years, bringing it from a prototype to a fully functional Reddit alternative.

Some would say this is damning with faint praise, others would see it as a warning.

(https://ibis.wiki/article/Announcing_Ibis,_the_federated_Wikipedia_Alternative@ibis.wiki)

Someone on Masto thought that the industry had missed a chance to call the procedure “spatchcocking”.