Interesting Links for 25-03-2016

[andrewducker]

Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day

(tags: ai funny racism )

A bunch of administrators reminisce about the time they deleted their production systems

(tags: epicfail computers )

Luke's Force Theme and Rey's Theme intertwine with each other

(tags: music StarWars video )

Defending good unions doesn't mean protecting bad ones (a story of really hideous corruption)

(tags: politics unions labour corruption uk )

Reviewing Pornhub’s New Virtual Reality Porn

(tags: porn VirtualReality )

Some Kind Of Abstraction: Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho 25 Years On

(tags: writing books psychopath history )

Extremely Shortened Versions of Classic Books For Lazy People

(tags: books funny )

More excessively abbreviated works of literature

(tags: books funny )

DailyMotion has a vast archive of unsold and unaired TV pilots

(tags: tv video )

Rage-quit: How one coder unpublished 17 lines of JavaScript and “broke the Internet"

(tags: coding programming internet development )

Houdini: Maybe The Most Exciting Development In CSS You've Never Heard Of

(tags: web css )

Comments

[matgb]

From::

When it comes to classic literature, people can generally be divided into the following three camps:

1. Those who have read it.
2. Those who pretend to have read it.
3. Those who keep saying they’re going to read it, but never do.

Ha! ha ha ha ha ha!

Missed at least two:
4. people who don't read books, especially fiction books, at all, and thus don't care about "classics" unless, perhaps, they're adapted for TV/film
5. People who've decided that life's too short and modern literature produces too much anyway, why bother with a 100+ year old "classic" written in an outdated style that can't really say anything about the world we live in?

Seriously, my too read pile is overflowing my bedside table, and that's just books published in the last 10 years, why on earth would I want to read something about posh people being stupid set and written in a completely different era.

[marahmarie]

Because it's fun? I found Anna Karenina to be particularly so. It's nice to imagine a world where almost everyone can seemingly afford to be ridiculous.

[matgb]

And then I read the javascript thing.

This didn't sit well with Kik (the company). Stratton responded the next day, saying "We don't mean to be a dick about it, but it's a registered trademark." He then mentioned that if Koçulu went ahead with a project with that name, "our trademark lawyers are going to be banging on your door and taking down your accounts and stuff like that—and we'd have to do all that because you have to enforce trademarks or you lose them. Can we not come to some sort of a compromise to get you to change the name without involving lawyers?"

"Hahah, you're actually being a dick," Koçulu replied. "So, fuck you. Don't e-mail me back." After a final plea from Stratton, he answered, "Yeah, you can buy it for $30,000 for the hassle of giving up with my pet project for bunch of corporate dicks."

I spent a huge chunk of my spare time on open source stuff. But the projects I work on tend to try to respect the law even if we/they disagree with it.

Trademark law may at times be daft, but it bites even big corps sometimes and has at least a point. The purist mentality of that idiot gives OS a bad name.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, the guy who then deleted all of his stuff was clearly being a dick.