Irish

Last days of Cisco

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@travis1567 @SwannMarcus89 I’m not arguing anything like that. Merely pointing out that Kamala was widely perceived as left of center. Any analysis of her electoral failure should take that into account; just as you would with her late entry, her incoherent extemporaneous remarks, etc.

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@travis1567 @SwannMarcus89 She may have run as a centrist but she was widely perceived as left of center, particularly on culture war issues (trans healthcare for prisoners, “Kamala is for they/them”)

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@PhilippAchtel @SwannMarcus89 If being a democrat in good standing means believing criminals shouldn’t be imprisoned, republicans should do fine in the midterms.

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@pegobry_en George Clooney

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@FrightenedAdult @ClickingSeason Even the “ugly” ones, or the ones cast in those roles, tend to be more attractive than average off screen, and have an undeniable magnetism and charisma

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@C_3C_3 I could be falling for obvious bait here, but I have to reply. As much as I appreciate wild speculation, that’s a Warhol, and widely read as subverting the chairman’s image. They were censored in China.

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@necros111 @kaeul0 @squiddy61 @Waubaugh @pat_hedger I wasn’t aware Coca Cola had a monopoly on the beverage market

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@Waubaugh @necros111 @kaeul0 @squiddy61 @pat_hedger It truly was novel. Information was much more difficult to access. Searching something as chaotic and sprawling as the web (even in those early days) was an achievement.

I won’t argue that easily finding a doctor in 2026 was entirely downstream of Pagerank, but not unrelated.

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@necros111 @kaeul0 @squiddy61 @Waubaugh @pat_hedger How long did GUI adoption take? Networking? How long before cell phones had significant market share? Technology adoption was so much slower in the 90s and early 2000s.

Go look at some Wired magazine issues from that era.

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@necros111 @kaeul0 @squiddy61 @Waubaugh @pat_hedger There’s a life cycle to companies. Big incumbents fail all the time. Microsoft was the juggernaut of the time. IBM was a player. Wintel clones were the dominant computing platform. Apple was failing.

After you see a few of these cycles play out, you’ll develop perspective

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@necros111 @kaeul0 @squiddy61 @Waubaugh @pat_hedger No, it’s not. Pagerank was a leap forward in quality. The rest of the industry didn’t have an answer, and failed in the market.

At the time, the digital media infrastructure we take for granted didn’t exist. People mostly found out about new websites in newspapers and magazines

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@necros111 @kaeul0 @squiddy61 @Waubaugh @pat_hedger Unsurprising, but not a counterpoint. Yahoo had a great brand a simple UX for the early web. Google had the technical edge, and high mindshare in media and technology for years before they truly broke through.

I lived through this. It seems like you’re googling for rebuttals.

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@necros111 @kaeul0 @squiddy61 @Waubaugh @pat_hedger Pagerank differentiated Google. Prior search engines had crude algorithms that returned many false positives, or relied on hand-curation. Altavista, Yahoo, Hotbot, etc were vastly inferior. Using Google was mindblowing in the early days, not unlike first using an LLM.

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@necros111 @kaeul0 @squiddy61 @Waubaugh @pat_hedger Pagerank is what differentiated Google, it was Brin and Page’s PhD paper at Stanford.

Many take for granted major (and highly difficult) achievements in technology, logistics, etc. It’s a very “electricity comes from the wall socket” way of thinking.

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@Jlafortetech @devahaz Making the right bets in a hypercompetitive space like technology is more difficult than pundits and commentariat assume. But it’s particularly strange to suggest he’s not aware of the threat AI represents to his business.

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@ISchopenhauer87 @christopherrufo I agree. Young people need more opportunity. But the vanguard of this socialist movement are resentful strivers, downwardly mobile and from affluent families. So called failsons and daughters with plenty of options, just not the ones that flatter their inflated self image.

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@an_anna_liszt @Noahpinion The Clinton campaign actively boosted Trump’s first run

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@dock263ds @LeeKuanYimby It resembles a concrete bin, that variegated surface and illegible deco text are compounding errors, it’s truly ugly already, and it’s just been completed, it hasn’t had time to develop the inevitable brutalist patina of grime

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@feelsdesperate I assume a significant number of Scientologists are in it for the professional network.

That was also likely the case with mainline Protestantism at its peak.

[Irish @foggiesttoad]

@VerminusM The French colonisation of Africa hastened the development of vaccines and saved millions of lives.