Hello internet friends,

seems like Mr DiCaprio finally got his pity oscar.
Congratulations.

Most people don’t know this, but this newsletter is now a well-funded startup in a swanky loft office with exposed brick walls. “Dominik, how is this possible?” you might wonder and I am not above sharing my path to success: Motivational posters.

Did that make you laugh? I have bad news for you.

Back in the days when we had to walk uphill through the snow both ways and all we had was crappy shareware games, I used to play some sort of fighting game with robots. The Japanese decided to make it real – and honestly a lot more awesome.
Just look at that chicken robot. A lot less scary than that Boston Dynamics robot.

There is a new Raspberry Pi in town, this one with WiFi and Bluetooth on board. By now the specs look good enough to replace most office computers – for a fraction of the price. I’m not sure what happened to the idea of running Windows on these things, though.

Or well, we could just put these things into animals and create cyborgs. (This one might actually be more scary than the Boston Dynamics robot.)

Sleep well.

Hello internet friends,

let’s open with a strong contender for the headline-of-the-year award: Wife crashes her own funeral, horrifying her husband, who had paid to have her killed
What a story.

Everyone on Twitter is mad about the company’s idea to move to an algorithmic timeline which showcases relevant tweets. Apparently this is how it works and tbh I think it’s a bit silly – the last time I saw a relevant tweet was probably 2010 anyway.

Last year had a lot of weird weather. Here’s a timelapse.

This is now bowling, this is ’Nam. And this time seen in photos from a North Vietnamese perspective.

Man, I can’t wait to be old. (At least where I am, 65 is also the age when most people retire? Coincidence?)

Nerd alert! Want to learn about CPU load averages? Of course you do.

And then there are a bunch of people trying to clean the trash out of the ocean. Go them!

Way back when ICQ was the biggest thing in the world I used to have an ICQ bot running with a simple markov chain. It would randomly add people[1] and talk to them and I had so much fun just reading those conversations. These days there are much better libraries for that kind of silliness and of course there is Twitter. So here is a Twitter bot markov chaining its way through my tweets.
It does interact with people, too, so that’s fun.

Take care!

Hello internet friends,

I am quite a big fan of looking at screens, but the scenario how the couple in this article consumes media/uses their devices scares even me.

Even though it is still absolutely inscrutable to me, the last two weeks peer pressured me into looking at Snapchat again. My post-snake-person[1] cousin, #oldguyonsnapchat, and the good people at one of the many[2] Slack chats all together managed what poor Teymur alone didn’t manage to do.
So, here we are. If you are a snap person, add me and please – and now you have to excuse me for using the same old joke that all the old people who have only a vague understanding of these new things have, use – don’t send me your genitals.

What would you do with your last day of internet?
Now that’s a fun thought experiment. The answers given in the article tend to be pretty boring, so here is mine, also pretty boring: Probably exactly what I do just now, trying to reach out to people. The internet is – and has been for almost two decades now – a way for me to connect to my friends and peers and if it just went away, I’d have to re-learn all the ways that people use to connect offline.
I might even have to use the phone to make calls, ugh.

Tempting: Every 3 Months, I Unfollow Everyone on Twitter
But probably: no. That article is via Lara who used it to justify following everyone I follow with her secondary account. It is a very special kind of hell to have a friend go through one’s Twitter follows and live-slack that experience.

Now for something completely different:

Think about an enormously muscled 1,500 to 2,000-pound animal, with horns the size of a full-grown man, which hangs out in herds of bored and testosterone-driven bachelor males, and has no fear of humans and no qualms about charging.

Lovely!

Have a good week – and don’t call Justin Bieber.