Completely random stuff that I am dumping the brain contents of:

If you code compilers, or develop your own computer language, people look at you funny, even in computer science departments.

If you call yourself an Alexa coder, and get into the Amazon Accelerator program, you're part of a thirty-one billion dollar industry with a 200+ million dollar fund throwing money at you.

Two points to ponder: (1) "voice command" approximates to "natural language compiler". Or, "natural language programming", if you're unwilling to stretch to compiler. Yet. So no, this isn't a trivial comparison. and (2) my oh my, how far we have come.

And how far we have to go. I have a great appreciation for the hard work it takes to get Alexa and Google's equivalent to do their things.

And I am yet frustrated when I experiment with trying to get our little gadget to stretch beyond its boundaries. That's ok, that's ultimately why I bought the thing, to play with, just as I play with computers via keyboard.

But I can see where this will go. Oh, so close we are...

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dGaSometer: a universal, hardwired human wetware device, but each implementation having slightly different calibration. dGaS = don't-Give-a-Shit, i.e. don't-Give-a-Shit-ometer. To measure your individual level of don't-Give-a-Shit.

A dynamic device, re-calibrated as needed, just as with any useful laboratory device.

The scale is often set by the most-unfirable person of acquaintance: the one least likely to get fired because no one else in the entire local quadrant could be found to do their job, not for love nor money.

Urinal scrubber (often the owner, depending on the particular location...), PortaToilet cleaner. Plumbers in the get your hands really dirty end of things, especially anyone driving a RotoRooter truck or septic-tank service truck. Chimney sweeps were the classic case, certainly in the Mary Poppins lens. These are the folks whose dGaSometer scales are likely fairly well pegged, compared to the normal folk of their acquaintance.

These are the things you think of one the way home from the day gig. Not because I had a bad day (no, really), but because I thought of a constellation of current and former co-workers, and it just sort of coalesced in my head.

And yes of course this will show up in a story someday. How could it not, I ask you? Once it's there, baby...

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The LightSail 2 mission gallery is here. This is very, very cool, no longer animation we're getting near-realtime views of the actual sail in action. Along with some great looks at the Blue Marble.

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So: Sun, IBM, DEC, VAX, Oracle in its first iteration, etc etc, were just way-too-early adopters?

Just shuddering, still, at the fact that we've come so far, only to reinvent client-server architecture all over again. And the licensing/fee structure that goes along with it. Oy ve.

Writers: this matters in some subtle ways. Don't let the writing you think of as important get caught in some cloud server, where it'll end up belonging to someone else because you didn't catch the clause in the click agreement... Just so you know, there are some cases where you can't use Microsoft Word to write for-profit (student editions, certain types of enterprise editions (universities, schools, libraries typically), and some other special cases are the examples I remember at the moment), so this is already a hidden issue, even though it's not normally enforced.

This will eventually come to a sticking point: the first time someone saves their script or novel to a cloud, one that's got an advance attached, and the big money tangles with each other over who owns what.