bookworm2342

All the episodes of Galavant are on the Internet Archive!

And there was this one guy I talked with who seemed super sharp, but had virtually zero experience writing software. When it came time to do the show-n-tell part of the interview he whips out his laptop, brings up a website, and spins it around to show me what he made.

A website of tiny ceramic frogs.

Not for sale. Just… all these ceramic frogs, organized into categories. Frogs on bicycles, frogs with hats, frogs sitting on lily pads. It was a virtual museum of ceramic frogs in web form.

I scrolled through his online collection of frogs, slightly baffled.

“This is your website?” I asked finally.

“Yep!”

“You coded this yourself?” I popped into view-source mode and poked around some incredibly well-formatted, well-commented html. I nodded slowly. This guy was meticulous.

“Yep!”

“So… where’d all the frogs come from?”

“I made those too,” he says, beaming. 

And while I’m processing this he rummages in his bag and pulls out a little ceramic frog working at a computer terminal. He places it on the table before us, next to the laptop.

“And THIS one,” he says, “I made for you! As a thank you for the interview.”

It was adorable. I hired him on the spot. I mean, why not? Worst case he’d wash out in 90 days and we’d hire somebody else. He turned out to be one of the best developers on our team. 

...Nonetheless, whether he does or not... he will still die, like all the rest of us, regardless of who may be at his bedside, alone in his head: alone. By himself. No one there to mitigate the pain, to be telling him how important he is, to make what's happening okay in any way whatsoever. He will cross the bar alone. And there is nothing he can do to stop it.

Nothing he can do with the science we have in this day and age will change that. Nothing invented in the next twenty, thirty, *fifty* years, will change that.

Is he a schmuck? Yes. Is he vastly wealthy and powerful (in the in-this-life mode) beyond the dreams of almost all of us? Yeah, sure!

Will it avail him at the moment when, eventually, beyond any ability of his or those he's paid to keep it running, his breath stops? NOPE.

...The comfort associated with this may be a bit on the chilly side. But (leaving aside folks' personal beliefs about what happens on the far side of the Last Breath) all his personal bullshit in the physical world will swiftly come to nothing.

Let's wait our time. I may not see it: but some of you will, and will be able to say, "Well THAT's over, finally."

(sigh)

Anyway, did y'all hear that they nuked the White House?

Google has already announced that they will be “rolling back” this feature because of screenshots like these:

An antiviral pill has, for the first time, been shown to prevent COVID-19 in people exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at home, according to trial results published today in the New England Journal of Medicine1. The drug could be a lifeline for those who still face real danger from the virus, such as care-home residents or transplant recipients on immune-suppressing medication.