It says so much that on July 9, 2026, the aspect of Platner she decided to highlight as problematic was…his support for Ukraine?
jbrjake
joined 3 years ago
I just saw one earlier this afternoon:
You seem like someone who would be prepared if gravity reversed itself.
Love this line from the wiki article: ‘A secretary he had interviewed for the piece said that a technical representative from Xerox had warned her "not to be afraid of the 914 because the machine would sense her fear and, like a mischievous child, misbehave."’
Pretty sure you’re thinking of tzdb, the time zone database: https://onezero.medium.com/the-largely-untold-story-of-how-one-guy-in-california-keeps-the-worlds-computers-on-the-right-time-a97a5493bf73
An adjacent and thematically resonant story is the volunteer effort that powers curl, which so many people use: https://thenewstack.io/the-world-runs-20-billion-instances-of-curl-wheres-the-support/
When the first DVD cracking util was released, DeCSS, it violated the DMCA and people were getting sued and threatened with felonies for sharing it. Very quickly people figured out loopholes to make it an archivable creative work, like putting it on tshirts and encoding it as a prime number: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime
One adjacent term is “frisson”: when it’s so sublimely awesome it gives you chills.