rictic

I have several thoughts about Starcloud, mostly re: their white paper from a couple months ago. (you can google it if you want to follow along)

The first is that their analysis of spacecraft solar costs commits an extremely common error that my wife and I call "the two-step." We used to mostly see this one in the business cases for space-based solar power satellites, but unfortunately it's been spreading outside its historic range over the last few years by hitching a ride on the shoe treads of engineers at the too-good-to-be-true solar cell startup Solestial (a story for another day). The two steps of the dance are as follows:

When calculating the cost of your satellite, assume the solar cells are the cheapest silicon shit from the dirtiest factory in China. You ever see a video from one of those? Dudes in stained wifebeaters using their bare hands to toss each other thigh-sized silicon crystals across the shop floor like those hot fishmongers at Pike Place Market. They're sweeping up the broken bits off the floor and selling 'em as "polycrystalline."

When calculating the power production of your satellite, assume the high efficiency and basically-zero degradation rate of the most rarified and high-purity triple-junction solar cells, each one artisanally handcrafted by a herd of free-range PhDs on a lush, thousand-acre ranch owned by a Boeing subsidiary.

Those two assumptions do not coincide in any actually-existing piece of hardware, and pretending that they do is lying!!

As an aside: Starcloud actually has an interestingly novel version of step 2: they claim that crazy-low degradation rates using silicon cells has been demonstrated on ISS, and they link to a NASA paper. Unfortunately, this paper only claims crazy-low degradation rates of short-circuit current I_sc, when in fact most degradation of silicon cell efficiency seen in space is due to decreases in the open-circuit voltage V_oc, which the paper conspicuously does not mention.

With respect to the thermal side of the equation, I'm actually going to give Starcloud some credit. Cooling a datacenter has two stages: 1) first you get the heat out of your chips and into the cooling system, and then 2) you get the heat out of your cooling system and into the "thermal environment" all around you.

The second stage is way harder and more expensive in space than it is on Earth, yeah. But honestly, the first stage is only a little harder and more expensive in space than on Earth. And in current terrestrial datacenters, the first stage is harder than the second step by far. Modern AI-grade GPUs are power-dense, they're physically massive, and their failure rate vs. temperature curve is basically vertical above 45°C: not a great combination of features.

ask me how long it took to realize that the << in

std::cout << 2;

and

7 << 2

Yeah it took me a long time to figure that out too - an an EE I was always too low level to even have a heap, and then later I was too high level to care about the implementation, so I was years into my career before I found out how it works*

like, really? that's the most trivial thing that compilers do! but that's not the worst of it!

a lot of the work of combining files together actually happens in a totally different tool that we call the "linker" (or, in javascript land, the "bundler")

so the dumb thing that compilers are named after, they mostly don't even do! the "compiler" mostly just does an optimized transformation of a smallish bit of code

unless! unless the language that you're transforming into isn't something that's enough like machine code. if it's too high level, we decided that it should have a different, less prestigious name. so we called those compilers transpilers. and those tend to do even less of the "combining multiple files into one" operation, they're usually file by file!

Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.

For anyone who'd like to follow along, I'm gonna share how to get around those things with group policies bc they're more user friendly and descriptive than registry editor imo :3 I'll also show how to get around needing a Microsoft account to get setup.

For the Device Setup

"OOBE" stands for Out Of Box Experience which is what that setup workflow is. But it also happens to be a folder with a little program in it that'll let you skip connecting to the internet; this makes it so you don't have to sign up with a Microsoft account and can just use a normal local one instead. And it already comes preinstalled! Here's how you get to it:

Hold Shift + F10, or Shift + Fn + F10 depending on your keyboard.

Click inside the window that pops up, type the following and press enter afterwards to run it: OOBE\BypassNRO

I believe it should restart your computer automatically, but if not then restart your computer or type: shutdown /r /t 0 /f

Now when you're brought back to the setup workflow, the page where you connect to the internet will have a new button on it that lets you say you don't have internet. Clicking that and proceeding through the rest of the setup lets you get around the Microsoft account thing.

Group Policies

You don't have to know much about them, these are just a bunch of specific settings for what your computer can or can't do that lets you decide how it works in different ways.

I'm gonna show you how to turn off the recommendations and internet stuff basically. For now bring up search and type gpedit, pick this

It'll open up to Local Group Policy Editor and we can get started :3c

Start Recommendations

In the side menu, go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar. Click on Settings to sort them with all the "Turn off" ones bumped to the top.

Here's what you should set:

Turn off user tracking: enabled

Turn off feature advertisement balloon notifications: enabled

Remove Recommended section from Start Menu: enabled

Remove Personalized Website Recommendations from the Recommended section in the Start Menu: enabled

Do not search Internet: enabled

Windows Spotlight

Back in the side menu, go down to Windows Components > Cloud Content

Turn off all Windows spotlight features: enabled

Do not use diagnostic data for tailored experiences: enabled

Cortana

In the side menu, this one's back at the top under Computer Configuration. You're gonna want to go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search

Allow Cortana: disabled

Don't search the web or display web results in Search: enabled

News and Interests

In the side menu go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > News and interests.

Enable news and interests on the taskbar: disabled

Microsoft Account Login Nudges

When you don't use a Microsoft account they'll nudge you repeatedly to sign in so you can "get the most out of your experience" *gag*. The group policy for turning that off has a note that suggests it might not work with Windows 11 though (implicitly), so you can close the group policy editor window now and for this last one let's just open up the regular settings.

Go to System > Notifications > Additional settings, then uncheck all the boxes. And there ya go! (✿◠‿◠)ﾉ u are done.

Itachi is likely the fastest person in the series at forming hand signs, so fast that Kakashi couldn't follow with the Sharingan active.

The public health agencies have spent the last few months telling everyone it’s “the queer disease” (Direct quote with word choice stolen from those “queers” themselves)

Facebook groups are full of “second chickenpox” rumors that are totally Monkeypox except that once again we’re not testing anyone who isn’t a gay man.

The kids going back to school in the fall is going to be a nightmare

Much like in the 1980s, there’s an anti-LBGTQ backlash going on

Except that this time since there’s “the groomer panic”, when all the kids get sick, it’s going to be “Those gay pedo schoolteachers” in half the districts in the country….

Despite widespread speculations to the contrary, MPX predominantly occurring among GBMSM isn’t driven by ascertainment or sampling bias. According to the data by @UKHSA, we can see that the positivity rate among men is considerably high compared to women & children.

She’s not claiming they’re not mostly testing MSM. Indeed, the data in screenshot demonstrates that they’re testing about 80% adult men, presumably mostly MSM.

She’s claiming that testing mostly MSM is *justified* by the data from the relatively small number of tests on others. That’s a very different claim. Maybe it’s a justified claim, but it’s not the same claim.

A collection of images and sketches I haven’t finished from @normal-horoscopes’ Amber Skies!

Maybe it's an elder millennial thing when this stuff was new and they wanted the kids to get a head start or something. We didn't have like programming classes or anything, but we got taught those basics, and then like how save files, how to use a word processor, etc.

I even had a class to teach touch typing and assignments to make WordArt.

I'll admit most of my actual knowledge is from dicking around and seeing what works and what doesn't (sometimes with help from professor google) but the fundamentals were absolutely learned in school.

Honestly, they didn’t teach it to me! I’m not sure that was part of mainstream classes for a lot of people.

We didn’t have dedicated typing classes at any of my schools except like an hour of computer lab a week in elementary school, during which time we learned how to use the Grolier encyclopedia and nothing else.

But also it’s like that XKCD comic -

I think people who are pretty good with computers really have a flawed conception of how bad most people are at computers.

I have had to explain to teenagers what a browser is. As in “okay open a browser - o-kay, do you see a ball that has four colors on it, and when you click on it it takes you to google? okay, that’s chrome, that’s your browser, click on that” and I think that probably two out of ten computer users don’t know what it means to right click.

You don’t have to know how file storage works if the way you access all your files is through apps that show you a thumbnail of the files! So people don’t think about how files are created or written or stored or recovered or manipulated by the computer.

But to be fair, this is also true about car parts!

Most people don’t know what a carburetor does, and could not explain how an ignition system works.

you single-click to activate things that don’t use double clicking

in the original comics, there was a big event called “Civil War”, where the various heroes aligned for or against the cause of every superhero having to register and make their secret identity public (They adapted much of this story into the movie “Captain America: Civil War,” but as always they just take out the parts they need and make them work better). As part of this, Spider-Man unmasked himself in public and said “My name is Peter Parker,” because he believed in the pro-registration side. And this revelation ruined his life and caused huge problems for him, but more importantly, problems for Marvel’s Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada, who thought Spidey had gone too far from his roots and also for some fucking reason thought Spider-Man’s marriage to Mary Jane Watson was untrue to his character, despite being part of his character for like thirty fucking years. 

So there was a storyline to undo this called “One More Day,” where Aunt May is dying of some super space disease that even Reed Richards can’t cure, and despite everyone in the Marvel Universe saying “dude aunt may is like a billion years old it’s her fucking time this is a bad decision that I am only writing because Quesada won’t listen to reason,” Peter keeps trying to find a cure. And he eventually finds the one being who will do it: Mephisto, who is one of the like seven different versions the comic has of the Devil. He says he can cure May’s condition, but in exchange, he needs to take away the one thing that makes Peter happiest, the one thing Joe Quesada has a bee in his butt about: his marriage. He retcons reality so Peter and MJ were never married, which has the side effect of being a comic book reset button that makes it so Peter never revealed his identity as Spider-Man, which was shit and everyone hated it because they liked Spidey and MJ being married and this thing presented as a big cost was obviously just a cheat to go back on an important plot development.

Got that? Good, none of it happened. Instead, let’s talk about what did happen. At the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home, the villain of the movie, Mysterio, has released a video where in his dying breaths he reveals Peter Parker is Spider-Man and blames him for all of the evil stuff he was doing because in that movie Mysterio was doing a bunch of evil shit and making it look like he was the hero stopping it. This revelation ruins Peter’s life and causes huge problems for him. He’s hounded by publicity, whether from people who revile him or people who already loved him and don’t believe Mysterio. It’s ruining his friends’ lives -- they get turned down from MIT because they are known associates of Spider-Man. 

So Peter goes to Dr. Strange, the super-powerful sorceror superhero who he’d met in Infinity War, and says “Hey, Stephen, can you like do a comic book reset button where everyone forgets that I was revealed as Spider-Man and we go back on this major plot development because it’s ruining my fucking life?” And then instead of making everything convenient for Joe Quesada, everything goes wrong.

As you’ve seen if you saw the trailers, Dr. Strange sets up this spell that will globally remove the memory of “Peter Parker is Spider-Man” from the world. As he’s casting it, Peter realizes what the implications are, and goes “Wait, can you make MJ immune to the spell? And Ned? And Aunt May? And and and...” and he tries to change the spell during casting so many times the whole thing fucks up and goes inside-out. Dr. Strange has to seal the spell in a magic polyhedron to stop it from going off because now it’s some fucking bad juju, and in the few seconds it was active, it did some bad juju.

So it’s a callback fanservice movie, right?

But because this movie is how to do callback fanservice right, these villains do not just rampage around until our Spidey knocks them out again. They all need to be caught to send them back to their home realities because their presence is Bad Juju for the universe’s stability, but this doesn’t take very long, and the majority of them are like “wait wait you’re not Spider-Man I’m mad at Spider-Man the fuck is going on here.” Doc Ock has been driven nuts by his tentacle arms and is trying to get out and do nefarious shit, but he’s locked down by his own tentacle arms. The Green Goblin is fucking wacko as shit and pure malicious chaos, but he’s also Norman Osborn, and Norman Osborn is terrified of him, and Norman actually turns himself in. Sandman is like “dude if I’m not supposed to be here send me back I need to see my daughter let’s go,” and all five villains are rapidly recaptured and put in magic holding cells in the “Undercroft,” aka Dr. Strange’s unfinished basement.

Dr. Strange prepares a magic device around the imprisoned spell that will send them all back to their homes. This is important, okay? Before the halfway mark of the movie the heroes have a BUTTON, which they can press at ANY TIME, to solve this problem and send these guys back where they came from. One push and their universe is safe. Boom. No risk, no problem.

But as Strange is preparing the device, Peter talks to all these captured guys, and they all realize something. They were all taken from their home realities moments before they died fighting Spider-Man. If they go back, they’re doomed. All of them have something seriously, seriously wrong with them, and it was about to result in their deaths.

And Peter says “No. That isn’t fair. These guys deserve a second chance.”

And he steals the mechanism from Dr. Strange before he can push the button, and there’s a fucking baller sequence where they chase each other through the kaleidoscopic “Mirror Dimension”, and Spidey leaves Strange webbed up in there and comes out with the device. Because the thing Spidey is trying to do in this film is not “I have to stop these bad guys from menacing the city.” He can stop them instantly. The thing Spidey is doing, the central struggle of the movie, is “I have to save these guys, they deserve a second chance.”

And the thing is, because the villains are cooperative for one reason or a another (Doc Ock would very much like to go rampaging but due to superscience that makes sense in context he’s locked down by his own arms), Peter has this chance to see what is wrong with them, and fix it. Once they go back, the thing that made it so they had to die fighting Spider-Man won’t be true any more. The fight will be over and they’ll live. So he takes them to his safe house, this apartment where him and Aunt May have been living, full of Stark superscience tech, a fabricator he can use to whip up a solution.

He does Doc Ock first: just like in Spider-Man 2, he had this neural interface chip to control the tentacles, it fried, and now they’re basically controlling him which is driving him nuts. Peter gives him a new chip. And it works. Doc Ock feels great. The voices stopped. He’d forgotten the voices could stop.

And Electro, he gives a device to that will basically bleed out all the super-electricity infusing his form, he’ll lose his electric powers but they won’t be a danger any more. Takes some time to suck it out of him, though.

Which is a shame, you know. Electro is able to be a reasonable guy, he knows what’s going on... but this universe, you know, there’s a lot of other super heroes, and there’s this incredible fundamental power to it. He’d have really liked to play with it.

And the Lizard, who has to wait downstairs in the van, you know, he’s intelligent, he’s cooperative because he doesn’t want to die. But he actually doesn’t care about his home universe, he doesn’t love anyone there. He just wants to turn people into lizards. He could do that here.

Norman Osborn, though, he has nothing to lose and everything to gain from a serum that will expel the Green Goblin persona from his mind, right? Except... ooh. Turns out, Norman is not in charge right now. The Green Goblin is back in the driver’s seat! And he says there’s nothing wrong with them, because the Green Goblin is cruelty and chaos and wants to make everyone as cruel and nihilistic as him. (Defoe knocks it out of the fucking park, by the way. The performances in this movie are amazing.) So the Green Goblin, he blows the apartment the fuck up. With that opportunity, Electro pulls off the device before he can be discharged. The Lizard rips his way out of the truck and runs off into the night. Sandman and Doc Ock get the fuck out of there.

This is all a really cool fight scene smashing their way through the apartment building, running into each other, but Green Goblin is the only one interested in staying around and really twisting the knife in Peter. By the time they make it down to the lobby level, Aunt May is there. The Goblin is able to recall his glider thing, loaded with all his explosives, and he blows the lobby the fuck up -- Aunt May takes a hit from the glider as it smashes the front doors in. Goblin escapes rather than fight the SWAT guys who just showed up. Peter has to get May to safety. He laments that this is all his fault. He never should have tried to help these guys, he put everyone in danger, they’re out because of him.

Let’s back a way for a moment, out of the MCU again. The original comics, Spider-Man’s origin story. He gets his powers when he is bitten by a radioactive spider, but the actual important part is when he lets a crook pass him by because why should he care, and that crook goes on to murder his Uncle Ben. The guilt over this and desire to never see it happen again is what makes him become Spider-Man. And in the Sam Raimi movie, that’s what happens. It is the impetus of Tobey Maguire Spidey’s character.

Then talks for Spider-Man 4 break down, Raimi leaves, and Sony reboots the series as The Amazing Spider-Man. And once again, Andrew Garfield Spidey lets a crook go and he kills Uncle Ben and that is the impetus of his character, and audiences were like yeah, okay, we saw that before not too long ago. Now, The Amazing Spider-Man also did another very important event from the comics: “The Night Gwen Stacy Died,” the event that ended the goofy-ass Silver Age of comics and ushered in the Bronze Age where stories could be more serious. Gwen Stacy is thrown off a high place by a villain, and Spidey shoots a web to catch her... and the momentum shift snaps her neck, and she dies, and it’s not a fake-out, it wasn’t bullshit to put on the cover to sell that issue, she is gone. That happened in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 pretty much the same way, and it would have been regarded as a nice thing if that movie wasn’t terrible.

So Spider-Man’s first appearance in the MCU wasn’t even in his own movie, it was in Captain America: Civil War, and he was already Spider-Man. Marvel was like “Yeah, yeah, Uncle Ben, radioactive geneitcally enhanced whatever spider, you saw this in 2002 and you saw this in 2012 and we don’t need to go over his origin story again, okay? You all are caught up.”

So Aunt May stumbles onto the rubble, and Peter has to help her back up... and wow, his hand comes back with a lot of blood on it. Like, a LOT of blood. He realizes that she was impaled by the glider, and he knew it was sharp enough to kill someone because he knows that’s how Norman Osborn was going to die. Like he realizes he can’t move her and he might need to go outside where the SWAT team is waiting to arrest him, blaming him for all of this, just to get the EMTs to her quicker. But it’s too late for that.

Now we cut back to Ned and MJ. Peter gave MJ the device and said “this is our failsafe, don’t hit the button until I tell you.” She has heard the news and knows it’s bad, it’s real bad. But Peter hasn’t told her to push the button and she knows how important it was he be able to save these guys.

And Ned, earlier there was a gag about how his abuela said magic runs in their family. And when Peter disarmed Dr. Strange, he stole his sling-ring, the easy to use magical device that lets people open portals,and Ned took it. While they talk and Ned gesticulates, he makes some sparks, and he realizes, it’s working. He opens a portal, saying “Show me Peter Parker!” And it opens right away. And out steps Spider-Man.

Who says “Who are you two?” And he pulls off his mask. And he’s Andrew Garfield.

Once they figure out he was pulled into this world the same way the villains were, Ned is like “No, show me the OTHER Peter Parker!” And it opens right away. And out steps Spider-Man. 

Who says “Who are you two? And he pulls off his mask. And he’s Tobey Maguire.

Both of them are the same roles from those previous films. They end up named “Spider Man Two” and “Spider Man Three” so they know who the fuck they’re talking to but the website refers to Garfield’s character as “Amazing Spider-Man” and Maguire’s as “Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.” I’ll just use the actors’ names. 

They need to find this world’s Peter, the one the other two both agree is “Spider Man One” because this is his native universe. Garfield says when he needed to think he would go to the Chrysler Building. Maguire says for him it was the Empire State Building. MJ knows where Peter is: the roof of their school, where he and MJ and Ned would just hang out. 

So they find him, weeping, destroyed. It feels like everything is gone, May is dead and it’s his fault and he’s falling and the world is burning up around him and all he feels is hate, hate for himself, hate for Norman Osborn, who he is going to murder with his bare hands.

And Maguire steps from the shadows and says “It was my Uncle Ben. I let a criminal go past me because it wasn’t my problem. And he went on to kill Ben later that night.”

And Garfield says “It was my girlfriend Gwen Stacy. I couldn’t save her. She died because of me. I went to a bad place after that. We felt what you feel, Peter. I just wanted to hurt them as much as I had been hurt. It didn’t make it better.”

They’ve all been there. Because they’re all Spider-Man. They are all driven by guilt and self-hatred because that’s what Spider-Man is about. And this is a movie about Spider-Man, the character, the franchise, all the characters, all the franchises, the mythic idea of this hero in the public consciousness. And they all are able to keep themselves together, keep themselves on the right track, by remembering some important words: “With great power... comes great responsibility.”

So they’re not pushing the button yet. They’re going to do this right. They’re going to save everyone they can, including the bad guys. The cures they had were mostly damaged in the explosion, but they have three genius Peter Parkers to put them back together. Garfield already made a cure for the Lizard, he just has to do it again!

And there are amazing interactions and character moments, serious and comedic, between all these guys. Like how Garfield and Holland are amazed and weirded out that Maguire just has the web shooters in his wrists and doesn’t have to make web fluid cartridges. Or all the other heroes in the MCU and how weird that is, and Garfield thinks he’s the lamest one because his other big-time villain was a dude in a rhino suit and Holland fought a space alien. Holland says proudly he was in the Avengers, and the other two are impressed, even though they think “that must be a really famous rock band in this universe.”

And Ned is trying to figure out if the other Spider-Men have their own version of Ned, and he finds out about Maguire’s best friend Harry Osborn trying to kill him, and that’s weird, man!

So they get the shit together, all their cures. They make a plan. They need to get the villains together, and the only way to bait them back is by showing them the device, because that’s the thing they all care about, it can still send them back to inevitable death. So Tom Holland calls in to J. Jonah Jameson’s Infowars-styled Daily Bugle podcast show and says “Yeah, I’m Spider-Man, I’m either a threat or a menace, everyone look at me, look at this magical box I have, I’m waiting at the Statue of Liberty with it.”

The Statue of Liberty is covered with scaffolding because they’re renovating it to add Captain America’s shield to it, because scaffolding is a cool place for superhero fights. Electro, Sandman, and Lizard show up to get the box and are surprised to see three Spideys, and a formless tactic-less superhero fight breaks out -- because two out of three Spider-Men don’t know how to work with a team, not like emotionally but like they just don’t have any other superheroes to fight alongside, and they’re failing and tripping over each other. So they pull back, they figure out who is Spider Man Two and who is Spider Man Three, and they lay out the game plan to the audience: we’re kiting and distracting the others while focusing on one guy at a time to lay the cure on.

What do I mean by emotional weight? MJ and Ned have the box and are back at the lab where they made the cures, but Ned is shitty at magic, so he doesn’t know how to CLOSE the portal. The Lizard notices one of these planks leads to a portal, and the device is in there, and he runs in and chases them out, and the Spider-Men are delaying him and holding him back but first they’re working on tagging Sandman with the cure... and MJ gets thrown off the scaffolding, from near the top of the Statue of Liberty, flailing helplessly as she falls to certain death.

And Andrew Garfield, acting out a scenario he’s undoubtedly played out a hundred thousand times in his head, knows what to do. He doesn’t shoot the web at her, he leaps after her, grabs her midfall, and then safely stops the descent for both of them. MJ won’t die like his Gwen Stacy did.

(this is later in the fight that this happens, these events aren’t 100% in order)

Doc Ock shows up. His tentacles are back under his control. He grabs our heroes and pins them, helpless... for long enough to get Electro to drop his guard, so he can rip off the Iron Man arc reactor he’s been using and jam the eletricity-drainer onto his chest. Of course he’s on Spidey’s side. He knew and respected Peter Parker, Peter Parker saved him, and in the comics, Doc Ock understands him because he was Spider-Man for a while.

“The power of the sun... in the palm of your hand...” he says with a laugh as he looks at the miniature arc reactor. His dream, the scientific goal he was pursuing that drove him to madness. Here it is. And he didn’t have to kill anyone.

Ned tries to sling-ring out for help, or an escape, or anything -- and he opens the portal to Dr. Strange, who is pissed at having been stranded in the Mirror Dimension. He grabs the device. He sees that Sandman, Doc Ock, and Electro have all been cured. He doesn’t push the button yet.

(Electro is not like “oh thank you you saved me from the madness” but he’s like “ah, you got me, I’ve got no superpowers any more so I’m not fighting, you won. I’m kind of disappointed, though. Spider-Man, you were from Queens, you helped out the little guy... kinda thought you’d be black, you know? I bet somewhere out there there’s a black Spider-Man.”)

And then of course the Green Goblin is there. He's a problem. He throws a bomb and he blows that magic device the fuck up, and not only is the button gone, the spell is out of containment and things are going Real Bad, and Dr. Strange can’t go help Spider-Man fight because he has to do something about the giant purple fissures in reality opening up around them.

The Lizard gets cured and it’s just the Green Goblin. Tom Holland knocks him off his glider and has him defenseless, just the two of them, on Captain America’s gigantic shield, knocked off where it was being mounted. Tom Holland knows Green Goblin was impaled by his glider, and he’s about to see it happen: he’s going to fucking gore the man who killed Aunt May. 

And Toby Maguire stops him. He puts himself between the two. They have to do this right. Norman Osborn doesn’t have to die for the Green Goblin’s sins. 

Even when the Goblin stabs him in the back, with great power comes great responsibility. Maguire falls out of the way, and it’s just Holland and the Goblin, and Holland throws the glider to the side, and jams the serum into the Goblin’s neck. (Whether it cures him, or it just suppresses that personality for long enough to get him more extensive help, doesn’t matter.)

But it’s not over. There’s, you know, the whole issue of giant purple reality fissures. Inside there’s silhouettes of a rhino, a scorpion, a huntsman, everyone in every reality who knows Peter Parker is Spider-Man and wants to do something about it. The spell is wildly out of control, Strange can barely keep things together, and he cannot fix this by just recreating the “everyone forgets Peter Parker is Spider-Man” spell.

This all started because of Peter, he wanted it both ways, he wanted to have his normal life and friends and be the superhero too and he put everyone through this so he could have it all. So it’s time to take responsibility. He tells Strange he knows what to do: don’t make people forget Peter Parker is Spider-Man. Make them all forget Peter Parker. Scrub him from the memory of the universe, and there will be nothing for these otherdimensional guys to chase after.

Strange is like “Yes, obviously that would solve the problem instantly, but I’m not going to do that! That isn’t fair and it isn’t right. You have a future. You can’t give up your whole life.”

But he can, and he knows it’s the only way. He has a few minutes before the spell kicks in, and he tells MJ and Ned. They’re shocked, horrified. They don’t want to forget him. They make him promise to find them again and tell them everything. 

And the spell kicks in. And everyone goes back to their home universes in a twirl of golden light. And Spider-Man, sure he was a masked menace, he fought all those guys on the Statue of Liberty, but Peter Parker? Who the fuck is that? Nobody has heard of that guy before. (okay no there’s gonna be other guys named Peter Parker it’s not an uncommon name but nobody knows THIS Peter Parker). He has no home, he has no money, he has no paperwork, no SSN, no high school diploma, nothing. He never existed. He gave up his relationship with MJ because he gave up everything to undo his mistake and it has the incredible gravity and impact that it should. One More Day was a cheat to get back to what Quesada thought it should have always been. This was a sacrifice that mattered. This was a tragedy.

He visits Aunt May’s grave, and there’s Happy Hogan, who doesn’t recognize him, but understands why so many people would want to pay their respects. She was an amazing woman who touched so many lives, and it’s such a shame she’s gone. He visits the coffee shop where MJ works, Ned’s there, and he sees they both got accepted into MIT. Like they would have if they never knew him. He almost starts telling them what happened... but he doesn’t. He leaves. They’ll be happier without him,and the future is bleak.

And then in the mid-credit scene we see that Tom Hardy’s Venom was also pulled into this dimension, and instead of going on a rampage, he has been getting shitfaced drunk in a Mexican bar hearing the wild stories about that purple space monster. The drunk-ass Venom symbiote exhorts him that now is the perfect time to go skinny-dipping, but then the golden light appears, and it shouts “No! No! We just got here!” before they vanish back to their home dimension. A little speck of the symbiote suit landed on the counter, though, and it starts to crawl off after Venom is gone...

Anyway, yeah. It was amazing. Everything it did, that was the right way to do that thing. The right way to do fanservice callbacks, the right way to do the origin story, the right way to do every single one of these characters, the right way to do One More Day, the right way to do an in-continuity soft reboot, the right way to bring Peter’s power level and importance back down to “friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” instead of the well-known inheritor of Iron Man’s legacy, the right way to do fights, the right way to do magic, the right way to do it all. This is a movie where the climax is not “we have to stop these villains from destroying the city” but “we have to stop these villains from destroying themselves.”

It’s a movie about second chances that gives a second chance to all those villains, and the other Spider-Men, and the film franchises they came from. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was a garbage movie that everyone hated, and now, now it’s this thing that gave us Jamie Foxx and Andrew Garfield’s amazing characters! Holy shit this movie, you guys! I ran on and on and gushed and gushed and covered so many details because this movie has SO MUCH to it, it’s a tribute to everything Spider-Man, and it’s exactly the right way to do a tribute. Respectful, but not worshipful. Built on context but not chained to it. Creating its own thing that flows from everything else, putting things in a new light, rather than emptily going through the motions like Ghostbusters Afterlife.

you can talk to them

they want your problems to be solved

you don’t have to worry much about social consequences

them challenging what you say is part of the script

a good therapist will also, by either personal experience or at least case studies, also have a collection of “This person was experiencing something very similar, the root cause was X, they got a lot better after doing Y” suggestions

this might be a sub-bullet of social consequences, but I find it much easier to tell therapists things that the recipient finds mentally burdensome, since it’s their job and I’m paying them. This is part of why I’ve never liked the “therapists are just commoditizing what your community/friends should be doing for free!” argument you see from time to time. I understand relying on your friends, and do to some extent, but there are things in my head they shouldn’t have to deal with!

They published his legal last name, didn’t they? Are you saying it was possible that they would publish something else?

as im sure you realize, Scott did the public name reveal prior to the article being published. “NYT would have doxxed him anyway” is quite different from “NYT doxxed scott”

Scott scorched the fucking earth by deleting his blog. A “mostly positive” article about how good a community SSC was, that threatens the community leader into destroying the community to protect his private life, killed the optics of the piece. It never got posted because Scott took extreme, expensive measures to fight it. The New York Times tried to doxx Scott, and would have if he hadn’t taken action against them.

But a bunch of assholes decided to dox Scott on Twitter (in the two months following SSC being deleted), so he gave up on being pseudonymous (also restored SSC). And yeah, I do blame the New York Times for that. They didn’t directly doxx Scott because Scott sabotaged their article. But other people decided to doxx Scott because he sabotaged the New York Times article. The NYT caused a shitstorm out of callous disregard for journalistic ethics. A shitstorm that spawned multiple news  articles. The shitstorm got Scott doxxed.

Four months after deciding to abandon pseudonymity, Scott opens Astral Codex Ten under his real name.

One month later the New York Times published a hit piece on Scott. Fuck the New York Times, fuck Cade Metz, and fuck you for defending them. Murder thwarted to mere attempt is still heinous. Doxxing thwarted to mere attempt similarly so. 

The content of OP doesn’t imply that the reporter is a liar. Because “NYT doxxed Scott” and “NYT would have doxxed Scott anyway” are different statements.

And yeah, I do blame the New York Times for that.

Nobody said you shouldn’t blame NYT for that, “NYT doxxed Scott” and “NYT is responsible for Scott being doxxed by other people” are also different statements.

Lots of people supported me when NYT doxxed me.

Alex is a knowing and intentional cause of the death, in the sense of "cause" that it wouldn't have happened without their actions, even if they didn't wield the knife or choose the specific circumstances of the death in this Everett branch.

Murder is causing the unlawful and premeditated death of someone.

By that definition, Alex murdered Bailey.

Let me be clear about this from the get-go: I think Apple's censorship policies are wrong and they have no grounds to be policing adult content within apps on the app store. Apple's power to set content policy over apps is absolutely fueled first and foremost by internal policy that goes back to Steve Jobs. After that, they're beholden to payment processors wanting to distance themselves from porn. Finally, there's lawmakers and policy that influence them as well. I think these are the 3 things that shape their policy decisions, in order.

What happens when you submit an App to the App Store?

You compile an app and submit it to the app store, and it proceeds through an automated and manual process to review your app to ensure it meets Apple's standards. Apple's standards are 1) non-malicious, functioning programs, and 2) programs that adhere to the App Store's review guidelines that cannot be asserted in the same way a program can. These guidelines are judged by a human being assigned to your app during the review process. The review process used to be long, sometimes it would take weeks, but in recent years they've got it down to about 24 hours.

Now, there's a laundry list of things in those guidelines, but we're going to focus on adult content because that's the most relevant. If a reviewer runs your app and finds porn, your app is rejected and you're told to correct the problem.

What's Tumblr dealing with now?

In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits' and finding porn. Sometimes they would search something more innocuous like 'socks' (yeah, i know) and find porn. Sometimes they would search something completely innocent and find porn anyways. Tumblr would get rejected.

This happened regularly. I'd say once every 5 updates (every time Tumblr updates the iOS app, they have to re-submit the app for review). A reviewer would find porn, and respond by sending us the steps they followed to find it and a screenshot of the content. Tumblr staff would remove the porn, resubmit, the reviewer would find nothing, then approve the app. Once in a while Tumblr would get a really persistent reviewer. It would take a handful of porn scrubs and re-submissions before they'd finally green-light an update.

Sometimes, however, Tumblr would get a reviewer who flags tumblr for porn, and when Tumblr opened the rejection notice, the screenshot would be something completely not porn. I'm talking stuff like a woman in a bikini. Not even posing in a porny way. Something you'd see in like, a laser hair removal ad. In these cases, Tumblr would appeal the rejection, saying the content doesn't violate our policies (and to the best of our knowledge, Apple's) so we won't remove it.

In this case, the appeal gets bumped up to a developer support contact that would manage the appeal. Usually when it got there, the contact would look at the report and say "oh, yeah, that's not porn" and tell us to re-submit the app again. It then would usually be approved.

This process, I believe, is where the problem lies. Of course, the bigger picture is Apple's adult content policies, but the relationship between reviewer, developer support, and policymakers is completely fucking discordant. Since the review process is human, some reviewers interpret the guidelines more strict that others. Since the review process chooses a random reviewer, the review experience is random every time.

The developer support contact is not in direct contact with the reviewer and does not communicate with them in any way, other than the report they receive from the review (that Tumblr has too). The dev support contact also cannot tell Tumblr whether they'll pass review if they were to propose hypothetical changes to Tumblr.

Here's the kicker: your developer support contact will also, like the reviewer, not be consistent from case to case. They stick with you until your appeal is complete, but when you have to open a new case for a subsequent rejection, it's someone new. And every one of them had different answers to the same questions about policies regarding adult content.

I really don't think the people enforcing Apple's app store guidelines have a clear answer on what's porn and what's not, and they're left to decide on a case-by case basis. Apple is fucking massive, and it's a waterfall organization where orders come from the top down. If Tumblr gets rejected because a reviewer decided a woman in a bikini is pornographic, no one in Apple gives a shit. I bet no more than a handful of people in Apple right now are even aware of the situation with Tumblr, and just one person (the dev support contact) is deciding what Tumblr must do to resolve it and stay on the App store.

The 2018 porn ban

I was present for the 2018 app store fiasco and boy, it was mind boggling. The removal was legit since Apple had received a user-submitted report of CSAM, and by policy they immediately yank an app that contains such content. That was 100% understandable, and if I were in Apple's shoes, I too would remove an app that has CSAM in it. But what followed was a gauntlet of rigorous reviews over adult content in general. The app was rejected repeatedly until the infamous adult content ban was fully enacted.

While Tumblr was actively working on the ban, they were asking Apple for any sort of guidance on what would meet approval, because as you know it's impossible to scrub a UGC site of adult content. The answers we got were either vague or unhelpful. Tumblr had to just keep re-submitting over and over with a half-baked porn finding algorithm until it finally looked clean enough for Apple.

During this time, we'd be searching Twitter, Instagram, etc, for the same search terms that we were being rejected for, and finding lots and lots of porn. When the rep was asked if other apps went through the same rigamarole that Tumblr was going through, and why they had porn on their apps, the answers we got were "we can't discuss other apps" (of course) and "that shouldn't happen".

Now, I do not want to get conspiratorial about this because I genuinely don't think Apple has it out for Tumblr. What I do think is it's a combination of the discordant enforcement of policy, caused by the complete separation of policymaker, support, and reviewer. It's also less of a problem for other apps like Twitter, Instagram, etc because they have many, many more staff to deal with the problem. They have more staff to build and maintain porn-removing algorithms, and more staff to put out fires caused by App Store rejections.

A little part of me also wants to be cynical and say that since Instagram and Twitter are so big, they can get away with more than Tumblr can. Combine that with Tumblr's history of blatantly allowing porn up until the end of 2018. I can't prove it, of course, but if Tumblr has a reputation at Apple, it can't be a good one.

Apple's reputation amongst developers

As I mentioned I'm an iOS engineer. I talk to other iOS engineers all the time, not only at my current job but also in other places like Slack instances for iOS development. The iOS engineers at Tumblr did not like Apple's bullshit one bit, which is unsurprising. However, my experience thus far is the vast, vast majority of iOS engineers at other places feel the same way. Apple's review process is seen as an asinine hurdle you must clear. Their policies are not viewed in good light amongst iOS devs, though you'll have a mixed bag of sympathy over being rejected for some of them like the adult content one. It really depends if you've worked on any UGC apps on the app store. If you have, you get it.

Outside of adult content, though, the two other big ones that rub iOS devs the wrong way are the 30% cut Apple gets when devs get paid, and the completely arbitrary policy that Apps submitted to the app store must have a "clear purpose". I haven't talked to a single iOS dev who's been on the side of Apple in the Epic v Apple case over the 30% cut, and most of them are hoping for Apple to loosen up their control over the App Store (either voluntarily or by court order). The "clear purpose" policy means that reviewers can reject the app if they think it's useless, which is incredibly discouraging for new developers who are just trying to get out there with something simple. It also squelches creativity and reduces the field for more single-purpose apps.

Aside from App Store review guidelines, iOS developers also have to deal with ever-shifting technical guidelines that can be unclear, with deadlines that change or are vague as well. A good example of this was a recent change that required all Apps that were available on iPad to support split-screen multitasking. Not only did I get conflicting answers on what that means from Apple themselves and devs who were in contact with other Apple reps. No one knew if their iPad app would be yanked from the store, or if there was a way to opt out. This requirement forced many companies to scramble to update their iPad experience to meet this deadline, only for the requirement to be relaxed, and the deadline to be pushed back. Fun times, great use of dev hours.

The Apple fanboy you can picture when I say "Apple fanboy" is very unlikely to be an iOS developer. They probably just love Apple products and think that the company can do no wrong. The more Apple does to piss off their developers, the worse it's going to get for anyone who just wants to use an iPhone.

Anywho, that's Apple for you. Why am I still an iOS developer? I dunno, I got bills to pay. I think I know what Tumblr is working on to appease them. Don't expect this banned word list to last too long. The timing is awful, of course, since everyone on Apple is on vacation, and Tumblr is too. Have fun with the chaos for now. As always, don't take it out on staff. They're doing what they can.