January 2023

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

[...]

This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

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But if there's one thing I remember about Sim by, it's his criticism of the Singaporean mindset.

The No U-Turn Syndrome, or NUTS, was how Sim viewed how Singaporeans always required a rule base to get anything done.

It's referring to how in Singapore, u-turns are not allowed unless there's a sign that allows you to do so, which is different from how other countries do it — you can u-turn unless there's a sign prohibiting you to do so. And to make things even more fun, there are sometimes no u-turn signs, too.

Eventually, the mortician was not pleased with the other bodies sitting around on beds of ice, so a LN Dewar capsule was secured for the remaining three. Another man was already frozen and sealed inside the capsule, so it was opened, and he was removed. Nelson and the mortician then spent the entire night figuring out how to jam four people — who may or may not have suffered thaw damage — into the capsule. The arrangement of bodies in different orientations was described as a “puzzle.” After finding an arrangement that worked, the resealed capsule was lowered into an underground vault at the cemetery. Nelson claimed to have refilled it sporadically for about a year before he stopped receiving money from the relatives. After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.

I reinstalled one of my RPis (moving from 32 to 64 bit).

Before doing the full reinstall, I took a dump (dd) of my disk.

Usually, I create one per partition, but this was the Christmas season, and I was half occupied with feasting and half occupied with entertaining Ila. So, mistakes were made.

I ran dd if=/dev/sdb of=backup.img -- but this means I can't mount the disk directly, as it's not a partition: