Imagine A Beowulf Cluster of These

[00:00:00] Uh, no, civil unrest, sir. Civil can't sweep. That's a problem for a doctor, not me. Civil unrest, sir. Very well. What a big cat's eat. Meat? He's got a lot of meat. You're thinking of civets, sir. Civil unrest is people. Oh, right. Well, at least it'll be a point.

[00:00:12] I guess that means it's 48 Minutes of Dogs Barking. I'm Jason, that's Bryan. We're harnessing the heat of the sun to generate AI images of fruit-fucking each other.

[00:01:27] It's very true. I make 20 bucks a month on eBay. I grokked it. I binged it. I was on Gemini. I was on Co-Pilot. No. I was also, I was on Anthropic. Yeah. And all the models point, the watermelon has the biggest fat juicy kitty pussy. Hmm. Okay. That's good to know. That's good to know. This is the bias of the air next. Yeah. What an absolute curse train of thought that was. Yeah, wasn't that fun?

[00:01:53] I do feel like I'm less of a person now. I think we all are at a certain point. We're all becoming less of who we were. Yesterday's price is not today's price. Correct. The same man who hops on his morning train to generate AI images of cartoon fruit-ching on each other is not the same man that steps off the train. I think that was Robert Frost that wrote that. I think it's like the only Robert Frost quote I know, or at least, you know, obviously I bastardized it for my...

[00:02:20] Gosh, wow. It's 48 minutes of dogs barking. This is our second time recording in seven days. We're, we're, we're fucking, we're hot. Woo! We're like J-Lo, we're like J-Lo over, over the engine bay of a vintage Austin Martin or whatever it was. You guys see this? Yeah. You guys see it? Wow. My face is really burning off here. You think that cam should be rattling like this? I think that was my eyeball. Oh, God. It's bursting like a cherry tomato.

[00:02:50] I can't fucking hear it. I can hear it. I can hear it pop. Like a balloon full of oil. You guys have a, you guys see my jaw? Where'd it go? Got burned off in the accident. Chad, is this bad? Are we quick, Chad? Kevin? Kevin, I need you to call me up here, man. Kevin. Oh, God. Imagine him in the midst of the burning wreck calling for Kevin Ubex. Kevin's just like sitting there in a chair with his guitar on his lap. Yeah, it sounds great, Chad.

[00:03:20] It sounds like you're burning, Jay. Somebody melting over here smells like a barbecue. I got so many more Doritos commercials left to make, Kevin. Still harping on the Doritos thing. I can't get over it. I thought that was Charles Starr for a second. Augmented reality. I was wearing my meta glasses to get better at Dark Souls. Goddamn it. You know, I once saw a man.

[00:03:50] God, it was so much fun to have on the show. I once saw a man devour his own son. They called him Saturn. I got the docket right here. When I was living in New York, I've decided to make this a challenge in the year of 2026. I went for a dexterity build. Which I know is not in style.

[00:04:20] I was going to do a pyromancer, but I felt that was cliché. All the kids have done it. I know I'm over it now. You know? I've been going to sleep to Elden Ring lore dumps. Vati Vidya is the most visited YouTube channel that I have now. All right. Same. Yeah, hey, nothing wrong with it. So this week on the news was a guy from St. Louis.

[00:04:50] Strangely enough, on a St. Louis news channel. Strange how that works out. A gentleman who goes by Professor Cindy. This year, according to Fox 2 now. A St. Louis content creator who built a viral following by inventing new words says a simple language experiment launched him into social media fame. Professor Cindy began posting under the persona in January after several years creating other content. His videos center on womboes or word combos, combining multiple terms into new expressions.

[00:05:19] Now, here's the deal. This is not exclusive to him. People have been doing womboes for a while. You may recall earlier. Isn't portmanteau a wombo? Exactly. But no, these are things like low-key Kirk genuinely, low-ker-kenually, etc. People have been doing this as kind of a joke format. This guy is making it local. He's doing some interesting takes on it. He was previously. He spent 15 years producing electronic music under the name Summer.

[00:05:46] The creator recently drew hundreds of fans to a meet and greet at Andy's Frozen Custard. He estimates 500 to 600 people attended. They spent hours taking photos, getting autographs, and creating womboes with him. And so this video, which is about 30 minutes long, so I won't bore you with the details. That's crazy. There's a three-minute piece on this. He did a whole segment. Yeah, he hung around. So a wombo is basically a word combo, but it can be a word that is...

[00:06:12] It doesn't have to be exactly like half of word put together with a half of word. The letters can actually be rearranged in different ways. So that's basically what a wombo is. That's really cool, though. So here's one of my favorites. This one is from 18 weeks ago, this says. And this is for Quish Penimus. Quish Penimus. So Penimus is Peak Cinema Analysis. Use this wombo when you want to know somebody's opinion about something cool that they experienced. So, for example, if somebody's watched all of Palm Beach Pete's videos, you'd say,

[00:06:42] Hey, I haven't seen those videos. Could you please just give me the Penimus? Please deliver the Penimus. This is just like fucking Hugo Ball sound poems. Blungo, blungo, blungo, blungo. Yeah. He's gotten to the point where he's doing brand deals with Arby's now, which is a little weird. So this is like Seized by Diana. Yeah. But like a really tan dude that lives in Lindenwood Park. Kirkwood, I think. But yeah.

[00:07:08] Because he came up with one that's Kirk plus W plus good is Kirkwood. Yeah. Quish Penimus. Yeah. This does feel like a dude that could tell me some really fucking weird stories about doing pills at the castle. Right. In 2006. This is a guy that like got kicked out of like Dante's. You know what? It wouldn't surprise me. So here's, here's a great one. Smart plus hilarious plus aura. Smollaria.

[00:07:38] Well, it hits, it hits at least. Oh yeah. Yeah. Kirk walk. I'm sorry. Kirk walk. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Oh yeah. His caniac combo at canes. He calls it a cane bow. What's bad is I know the people I have to send this to after we get done recording. Like, Hey, this is exactly your kind of brain worm. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. This is like almost like a, Hey, so I noticed you have some early symptoms of being pre-diabetic.

[00:08:04] I just, the transgender plus fam, of course, trans am. But yeah, a couple of weeks ago, it was on the 17th, 730 to 930 in Kirkwood. Uh, he met some fans at the Andy's custard. They did some live wombo's at Andy's. Let me see if they got the video here. Yeah. There's frozen meetup post ice cream. Feet pics. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:08:32] I do feel like I'm, I've, I'm like, am I going to smell toast? Yeah. Right. Yeah. I was, and I were chillaxing out in our gyno biology class, but I almost had a nonchalash out due to the sarcasm he created between us with his heart, sarcastery, sarcastic mastery, nonchalash out, nonchalant crash out. I know someone that's like very fluent in Latin that would lose their fucking mind over this. Gynobologist is also, but yeah, it does say here, fans regularly do submit ideas for new wombo's.

[00:09:01] He's working on a dictionary, other words, and plans to expand his content, collaborate with other creators, host more events. So I'm very excited because he's a local guy. Gynobologist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is what happens when you take the la out of the water. Well, here's what happens when you don't have quality control at eBay. Ooh boy. Dexerto. This article, eBay paying 56 million to couple who were sent insects and bloody pig mask by staff.

[00:09:27] As of yesterday, eBay has agreed to a $56 million settlement with bloggers who were sent insects, bloody pig masks, and other items after criticizing the platform. This goes back to 2019, by the way. Yeah. I want to say that this is not my first time hearing about this. I want to say I've listened to a podcast out maybe behind the bastards. Maybe. This is, when this came back around, I'm like, oh, I know about this. This is insanely fucked.

[00:09:51] So their whole deal was they sued in 2019 eBay and members of staff after claims of harassment. They ran a website and newsletter, e-commerce bites, where they'd been critical of the online marketplace. The seven-year-long lawsuit, which obviously just ended, saw seven eBay executives plead guilty to different charges with the platform also being hit with criminal charges by the Department of Justice and paying a fine of $3 million. On July 18th, just a couple days ago, the couple announced they had reached a settlement

[00:10:21] with eBay over the harassment charges and the Steiners are getting paid $56 million by the platform. Upon the settlement being agreed, eBay admitted that the situation, quote, never should have happened and what the Steiners faced was, quote, reprehensible and wrong. Former eBay CBO Devin Winnig is also paying a million dollars of the settlement. As communications from himself to other executives surfaced in the lawsuit, the former CEO was found telling another executive to, quote, take her down in regarding to Ina Steiner.

[00:10:47] The couple's lawyer, Christopher Murphy of Scally Murphy Law PC, said that the resolution sends a clear message that corporations and their executives cannot engage in this type of misconduct without facing significant consequences. So the story is that over years, it wasn't just one time, it was over years, the bloggers were sent a number of different items from eBay executives, a funeral wreath, insects,

[00:11:11] bloody pig masks, a book on surviving the death of a spouse and a fetal pig. Yeah. Their home address was posted online with public invitations for adult activities, threats on Twitter. eBay executives reportedly also turned up at their home. Yeah. Yeah. It's fucking insane. To put trackers on their cars. Insane. You'd think this was beef between two, like, pastry chefs. Right? Well, it's finally happened, Brian.

[00:11:40] It's actually finally happened for the third time. KFC has its history of really weird collaborations, especially in Japan, where KFC is inexplicably a gigantic brand. Well, they're doing the third, again, the third one of these for the Pretty Horse Girl Anime Uma Musume Pretty Derby. According to this, according to the actual official Uma Musume Twitter account, they are bringing back a partnership with KFC Japan.

[00:12:08] Horse Girls are being paired with KFC. There's going to be a special sauce for your tenders that is carrot flavored, going with the horse theme there. Ah, yes. This is Tokyo Weekender. Even if you're not familiar with Uma Musume, you've likely seen these anime girls. The box is amazing. Yeah, all the anime girls, all the horse girls drawn in the style of the Colonel Sanders. Just phenomenal. Oh, yeah. So inside the box, two pieces of original chicken, five nuggets and a biscuit.

[00:12:37] The box also comes with a serial code that you can claim items in the game. Remember, Uma Musume is a game and an anime. Uh, so you can get codes from KFC Japan to get special items in the game. Uh, limited edition trading cards, a chance to win an acrylic stand, but also the art. Fuckin' amazing. The real-life Uma Musume Colonel, the Ikebukuro West Exist Store has been transformed into Uma Musume Land.

[00:13:06] Posters and standees of characters either dressed up to eat fried chicken or, in the case of this illustration, dressed as Colonel Sanders himself, complete with the mustache and the little soul patch there. Brilliant stuff. And it's going from August 24th to September 13th, again, in Tokyo. Brilliant. Amazing. Of all the things to team up with, as far as anime goes, KFC, the horse anime, and also, again, the third time. If it works, it works. I guess so.

[00:13:36] Have you watched any of the anime or played the game? I have not. Do you know what it is? I'm familiar with it. Okay. I'm familiar with it because I remember it being very popular on Twitter like a year ago. Yeah. The game is kind of getting all these brand deals and then the anime's coming back and so they're kind of pushing all that as well. So, great stuff. You know what isn't amazing? Jeez, Rick, is it a crypto scam of the week? You're listening to 48 Minutes of Dogs Barking, the podcast. And now it's time for the crypto scam of the week.

[00:14:08] Kevin, I can't see you so good on my one eye, the crypto scam of the week. Yeah, Jay. Yeah, Jay. Decrypt gives us this story. Fake Flare Network staking site drained 8.5 million in XRP, says Seoul Police. Okay. A fake staking site that ran for eight days last October took 3.4 million XRP from 71 investors

[00:14:33] worth 12.3 billion won or 8.5 million US, according to the police in Seoul. Two men, both 29, have been transferred to prosecutors on aggravated fraud charges. Local outlet Chosun reported Thursday. According to the police, the site, fxrpntwork.com, impersonated Flare Network and its FXRP token, both legitimate projects, and promised monthly returns of 1.5 to 1.8% with principal guaranteed.

[00:15:03] Investors were allegedly directed to move XRP off domestic exchanges through overseas venues and into wallets the group controlled before the site shut down on October 23rd and the operators disappeared. So again, the site ran for eight days. They got 8.5 million dollars. Police said the group planted false information on portal blogs, online news articles, and Wikipedia and produced YouTube videos featuring a paid stand-in, so anyone researching the project found what looked like an independent corroboration.

[00:15:32] The scheme followed FXRP's actual launch the month before. The stand-in, 34, so the guy who was in the video just being a spokesperson, has been charged with fraud. By the way, police put average losses at 173 million won or 119,000 per victim across the week that the site was live. Police froze 17.3 billion won of assets across overseas exchanges as soon as they detected the scheme. Another 10 billion won moved during the investigation and is unaccounted for.

[00:15:59] Together, that is the 27.3 billion won or 18.8 million investigators traced through wallets linked to the group well above the 12.3 billion confirmed lost by the 71 known victims, which police say means there's more victims out there. They got tipped off by an overseas exchange last October about a surge in staking fraud. Investigators executed search and seizure warrants, 54 of them, arrested one suspect at a hideout after he returned from abroad and picked up the others in sequence.

[00:16:28] A fourth man, 29, is overseas under a Interpol red notice. None of the four have been tried. Police aren't making their identities public. Good that they got them. Weird that at eight days they took that much. Is, but man, that XRP army is loyal. Is that true? Yes. I don't know. I don't know nothing about it. So yeah, XRP is the, if we're talking about the fandom or whatever, the vibe around the token are really some sweaty people.

[00:16:57] Not much to really comment on this other than goddamn. Yeah. I think the, if we're talking about the mainstream crypto coins, alt coins in particular, I think like the two sweatiest communities around crypto is probably Link and XRP. Huh. They, I mean, the Link fandom is called Link Marines because they're consistently underwater. Okay. That's pretty good. I like that. Sense of humor.

[00:17:27] You got to have one, I guess. Yeah. Jesus. Jesus. As soon as somebody tells me to move my money overseas, that's right when I know. Like everything else can be look legit, but man, you're telling me to move my, my money into like an Iraqi dinar exchange. Okay. Wait a minute. Hold on. Do not disparage my Iraqi dinar. I know. I know. I know. My Iraqi dinar will be acknowledged. My RV is coming. RV is coming. I do still have, I told you this. I have some actual paper dinar. Yes. Because you, remember you gave me some. I did.

[00:17:59] Bookmarks. Bookmarks. It's so, I mean, they're like, they're like bank. They're fresh bank though. Yeah. Yeah. They're, I mean, they've been pressed between books for years. They've never seen the light of day. And I got them from, you know, some people who went to Iraq and this was after the fall of Saddam. So these are bills that have Saddam's face on them. Yeah. Well, I think you're also really bearing the lead about your most interesting bit of Saddam Hussein family memorabilia.

[00:18:26] Well, now see, I can't really trace the providence of that one very well, but allegedly, allegedly I own a lamp that was once hanging in the foyer of one of Uday Hussein's many houses that he had strewn about. It was rewired for American wiring, but yeah, allegedly that's, that's one of the things I own. I don't know if that's actually the case. This is the providence is like second or third hand. So it was brought over from Iraq for sure.

[00:18:55] Cause the wiring was definitely, you know, overseas type of wiring, but I don't know if it's actually 24 frames per second. It's a pal lamp. Yes. I see that one, that one light flickers every couple of frames. Yeah. Just try. I'm also just thinking of like, what, what does Iraqi energy grid look like? Well, for a while they're not so great, but it's getting better. Well, yeah.

[00:19:21] I think in the early nineties, we, I think that's where the phrase bombed them back to the stone age came from. Yes. Yes. Cause of what we did to their power grid and any attempts that they had at like power plants. It was just, there's a lot of rubble. What are we doing? What are we doing to the Iraqi people? What are we doing in Iraq? Folks going on Iraq. We're not letting people turn on their lights. What kind of world are we living in? Like, would you see America? Yeah. Hope you do.

[00:19:47] You're only going to see it eight hours a day because there's no fucking electricity. It's so powerful. That bit. You're like, would you see America? Like just that phrase. Well, the one thing we can count on, the one thing we've always been able to count on since 1997 is our main topic tonight. The wonderful folks over at slash dot slash dot. Ladies and gentlemen, 1997 started on the beautiful campus of Hope College in Holland, Michigan

[00:20:16] by two students there. Rob Malda, also known as Commander Taco and Jeff Bates, also known as Hemos. Amazing user names. I know. Truly. They created a team called slash dot media. They have a handful of editors. Bo HD, Manish S, Manish Singh, David Editor David, and Logan Whiplash Abbott. What does the name mean? This is from their FAQ, which is still around.

[00:20:45] Websites don't have FAQs anymore. That's the thing I've noticed. If they do, there are always like four or five expandable questions. You just click on the question and it's like, how do I register an account? Well, you go over to the log on page and you're like, motherfucker, I want some lore. Yeah. Tell me about the webpage. I want to know how you came up with this idea. The website itself is fairly basic. The headline is always, news for nerds, stuff that matters.

[00:21:11] And the site is, it's still, I mean, it looks pretty much like it did in 1997. It really fucking does. And slash dot's gone up and down in popularity over the years. But it's always just been consistent. I was reminded of the site. You mentioned it to me as a topic, but I also thought, you know, I just heard recently from Drew Curtis of FARC. You know, because we talked about FARC in the early days of the show and how, you know,

[00:21:36] Drew Curtis really has kept the site pretty much the same for the last 25 or whatever years. Drew Curtis wrote this thing on FARC the other day and I thought it was really interesting. He also is on Blue Sky, by the way. It's DrewCurtis.PSky.social. But he did write this whole, not ready to go on the cart is the article that he wrote. I made a comment on Blue Sky the other day late at night that FARC wasn't likely going to survive the year without adding a ton more subscribers and it went viral. First of all, thank you. I posted that without much thought behind it. It's just where my head was at that particular moment.

[00:22:05] What I said is also true. This has been the hardest year since 2009 revenue wise. Is FARC going to imminently disappear? I have a few moves left to make. I remain hopeful. The amazing response this week has taken some of the pressure off and I'm deeply grateful but we're not there yet. He's trying to explain why. The general web ecosystem is in trouble, but for several different reasons. And he goes into why basically because traffic usually comes from social and search and that

[00:22:31] search has gotten fucked because Google just displays the AI summary and also because social has been disincentivizing anything that takes you off of their walled gardens essentially. I mean, that's what he's saying. And he's right. Dig, Kevin Rose tried to relaunch Dig, but after a few weeks he had to pull the plug on it. According to Kevin, dig.com domain retained a ton of search mojo left over from the before times. SEO content bots noticed this and showed up in droves.

[00:23:00] Dig got hammered by bot swarms trying to rig search results, forcing them to pull the plug and pivot in a different direction. FARC, meanwhile, has always had such terrible search mojo for whatever reason. I think it's the name. But yeah, I mean, he talks about, you know, the bot problem and why is it worth it supporting FARC? FARC is one of the last remnants of the web that was part of the only nostalgia ever based on losing something real. And I bring that up because Slashdot feels to me of a piece.

[00:23:30] FARC and Slashdot were two news sources that when I worked in radio, which itself was 15, 16 years ago, for our overnight show, those are the places we would look for breaking news. Drudge, FARC, Slashdot, maybe some other site, but those were the big ones. Because those were the places where people were and those were the places where people posted shit. Yes, this website feels like I'm in 1998. Not necessarily in a bad way, but man, this is just...

[00:23:59] Frames are no frames. Frames. So what does the name Slashdot mean? From the Slashdot FAQ. The Slashdot is an intentionally obnoxious URL. When Rob, again, Commander Taco, registered the domain Slashdot.org, he wanted a URL that was confusing when read aloud. Try it. And yeah, Slash is usually when you're talking about a character. Dot is the period. Dot org. Dot org.

[00:24:24] So like, wait, that doesn't make HTTP colon slash slash slash dot dot org. And you say, try to actually type that in without spelling out the words slash or dot. You're like, oh. And so some people, when they refer to the site, they do just put a slash, a forward slash, and a period. Yeah, that's how I mostly knew it. Or they called it. Some people call it S-D-E-R. Right. Whatever. The whole point of the site is just to post news stories that are tech related.

[00:24:53] It's about as simple as it gets for a concept for a site. Now, of course. I mean, there's a part here to get your IP unbanned. Yeah. That is such an old school concern. Why is my IP banned? Reason ban. Calling Satoshi Miyamoto the N-word. End of ban? Never. Mm-hmm. Much like other sites at the time, I remember the Style Project blogs did this. They have a karma system. This was also pre-reddit.

[00:25:23] So the karma system on slash dot was there. Improve your karma by posting, basically. And if you get consistently terrible karma, then your karma goes down. So it says your karma is a reference that primarily represents how your comments have been moderated. Karma is used to determine who moderates and who doesn't. You can improve your karma by posting intelligent, funny, informative, or comments generally impressive to your fellow readers. Karma is structured from terrible, bad, neutral, positive, good, and excellent.

[00:25:52] If a comment you post is moderated up, your karma will rise. Conversely, bad karma indicates a user used to spam or otherwise hurt the discussion. Pre-reddit, same kind of concept though, right? Mm-hmm. Factors besides moderation also affect karma. Having a story submission accepted raises your karma. Meta moderation can change your karma. This encourages good mods and ideally removes mods from bad people. Are there anti-troll filters?

[00:26:20] A handful of filters have been put into place to make sure that people don't abuse the system. For instance, the same person can't post more than once every two minutes. If a single user is moderated down several times in a short span, they get a temp ban. Basically a probation. What is the fire hose? This is a fun one. Fascinating. So it is a feature of the site where basically it gives you everything on the site all at once.

[00:26:44] So if you hit the fire hose and go all comments, articles out of order, there's things that, and then, you know, you can view the comments on something. But yeah, it's just every link that has been blasted out in the past, however long. Let's see. 5 p.m. Yeah, this is all today. But then, like, 2.21 p.m. Yesterday, 4 a.m. This is really interesting. Okay. It's kind of neat. And then popular works the same way, but it's weighted.

[00:27:11] So things that people have moderated as good or things like that, including some comments, right? Yeah. I mean, like, slash that was such a ubiquitous thing for so many years. It still has, obviously, its footprint. Mm-hmm. But when, like, I first joined Twitter and, you know, you're trying to find things and find people from Fyad and local music people or whatever, I was like, oh, Slashdot. Like, I've just been following Slashdot for, like, almost 20 years on Twitter. Just, like, I don't really read Slashdot.

[00:27:40] I just see, like, the little icon of, like, the truck. And, oh, yeah, they're still here. So by the following year, by the year after it was created, the site was seeing 100,000 page views per day. And advertisers naturally flocked to the site. According to a Salon article called Geek Central. Three months ago, Commander Taco, the mind behind a website called Slashdot, posted a rumor. Blizzard Entertainment might produce a Linux-based version of its soon-to-be-released game, StarCraft.

[00:28:05] The rumor turned out to be false, but within hours, so many Slashdot readers had sent email to Blizzard that a support manager complained it was slowing the company from actually finishing the game. But that was nothing. Two months earlier, January 12th, Commander Taco, who goes by the name Rob Malda in The Real World and is Slashdot's publisher, editor, and chief and lead programmer, published an editorial calling for Netscape to join the free software movement. Eleven days later, Netscape complied. That's pretty cool.

[00:28:33] Wow, this guy might be a little more influential than I thought he was, says Del Simmons, a programmer who regularly submits news items to Slashdot. Malda doesn't take credit for Netscape's decision, and he regrets the Blizzard incident, but there's no question that with Slashdot, Malda has created a force to be reckoned with in what, for better or worse, can only be called the nerd community. Since its official unveiling last September, again, 1997, Slashdot has speedily grown into one of the web's most popular spot to find news about events that concern computer geeks.

[00:29:02] I fucking... just geeks, man. It does say, basically, Slashdot is nothing more than a consistently updated list of pointers to articles posted elsewhere on the web, combined with a forum for bulletin board discussion of each of these articles. Malda and other volunteers do contribute original content, but the key to the site's success is its ability to act as a clearinghouse and filter for news about core geek issues. 1998, Malda receives up to 400 submissions from Slashdot readers loading into events, etc.

[00:29:31] The question is asked in this early, early Salon article, What is cool for the Slashdot community? Well, for starters, anything to do with Linux, or free software slash open source movement. But Slashdot is more than just an open source advocacy site, as a reporter for Wired dubbed it. Malda and his band of trusted cohorts, Slashdot regulars who have the power to add links to the page without previously clearing it with him, will post pointers on anything they feel is of interest. This could mean news about Star Wars, or games, or password hacking.

[00:30:00] Ryan Meader, president of Blacklight Media, which handles advertising for Slashdot and several other websites, says Slashdot is the fastest growing site in the network and is already profitable. I think the estimation was that they made $18,000 in a year just off the website. Wow. This is not too bad for 1998. But yeah, 1999, the site got sold to Andover.net for $1.5 million in cash, and $7 million in Andover stock at the IPO price.

[00:30:27] Andover.net became GeekNet, if you remember that. They bought GameStop in 2015. GeekNet, of course, became ThinkGeek. Hot Topic offered to acquire the guys at GeekNet, but were rebuffed. Wow. Hot Topic offered to buy them? Yeah. It's such a weird... Yeah, 2015. Weird sentence right there. Part of the deal, it says here on the Wikipedia page, was contingent upon the continued employment of Malda and Bates, and on the achievement of certain milestones.

[00:30:56] And with that acquisition, Andover.net could now advertise itself as the leading Linux slash open source destination on the internet. They changed their name... They changed their name after a merger with VA Linux 2000, changed the name to SourceForge. SourceForge, if you're familiar, that's a centralized software storage platform. Yeah. So you're saying that Slashdot was the number one website for Linux-loving sluts? Yes. They just didn't post nudes on there, sadly. It's a real shame, really.

[00:31:26] February of 2000, their 10,000th article was posted. Two and a half years to get to 10,000 news articles. Not too bad. 100,000 articles, 2009. They did have to, much like FARC did, push off political stories to a sub-site, politics.slashdot.com, because this was 2004. Oh, yeah. This was, uh... Somebody say banana? God. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:55] Now watch this drive. Watch this drive. Some of the weirder things happening around that time were, of course, you know, the fact that John Kerry resigned. We had the intelligent design debate. They captured Saddam Hussein. Yes. A thread entitled, What's Keeping You on Windows? This was 2002. What's Keeping You on Windows was the thread. And it was the 10th most active story in history on the site. I think in the Hall of Fame. It's still up there. Let's see. Yes. Most active stories.

[00:32:25] This is just recently. This is the Hall of Fame. What's Keeping You on Windows by Cliff. This was, again, 2002. This was an ask.slashdot story. So these would be almost editorials. The staff, like this guy Cliff, would ask a question, usually on a Friday afternoon or a Friday evening, to fuel discussion over the weekend. This particular thread blew the fuck up. Chanel asks, here's something I've wondered about for a long time.

[00:32:52] While it seems the majority of slashdot readers are no fans of Microsoft, recent polls show that 47% of slashdot users are using Windows as their main OS, and I bet that number is much higher in server logs. So I have a two-fold question. Is it just the vocal minority that prefers alternative OSs over Linux? And two, if not, what's keeping you from putting your money where your mouth is? Why are you using Windows?

[00:33:17] My own situation is that I use an IT-mandated Win98 laptop at work, but at home, I'm Mac OS X all the way. While I did pay Microsoft for Office for Mac, I try to avoid filling their coffers whenever possible. So for all the family slash friends who rely on me for computer recommendations, I recommend Mac or Linux. Do people like using Windows? Are games the driving factor, or is it just the right tool for the job? Big quotes.

[00:33:46] It's a perennial question, Cliff says, and one that is fitting to review every so often, if only to see how far open source has come and how far it needs to go. And now, the flood of alerts. Why are you still on Windows? Why the Microsoft ads on slashdot, of course. But yeah, these threads just blew the fuck up. Now, what's interesting about these threads is that they are in a very old school bulletin board fashion, meaning that instead of straight down, where you can just see everything in

[00:34:14] an orderly fashion, kind of the view that we assume is a billboard, is a BBS style, these are nested. The original comment is at the top, and then any comment below is kind of indented to the right a little. Every time a new comment's added, it kind of has this cascading window. Indention. Well, that's not a design that you see a lot anymore. No, there's a couple websites. I think DP Review, digitalphotographyreview.com, still does that shit.

[00:34:44] And the way that they have their pages set up, it actually, thankfully, you can click a little delay and have it set to the normal, because it would be a more normal thread read. Yeah. Instead of a nested. God, the nested ones used to drive me fucking nuts. Yeah, because once you start getting to a farther, far enough away, it then starts indenting back to the left. And so it looks like there's a cordion going back and forth.

[00:35:11] So yeah, some of these really, really long threads can go all the way to the side of the page on the right, and then start going all the way back to the left. But it does make reading threads a little bit easier, because you can tell who's responding to who. And you can kind of tell where this response is going to, things like that. But a lot of the common answers back in 2002 are games and work, a lot of graphics work. We need Photoshop. I always found that Photoshop ran better in Mac. That was my historical, you know, this was 2002.

[00:35:41] This is what I want to have been on the candy colored little iMacs in the graphic design lab. I just love here, I'm looking at this post from November 15th, 2002, and it's titled Two Simple Things. One, games? Two, work? One, until all games run under Linux without much difficulty, I simply don't have any choice here in nearly all the Xbox and PS2 games in the world don't hold up to a single quality PC game.

[00:36:09] And all I can think is like, buddy, 25 years later, man, you'd still be weighing for Linux. Linux. I don't know. It's not as bad as it was. There have been a lot of progress. I mean, you've seen a Steam Deck. Yeah. A Steam Deck runs on a modified Linux version. Yeah. I had a modified Linux version recording our episode right now. Yeah. So it's not as though it's unheard of. I do think there's problems with Linux. There's a Proton and a lot of other things are doing great strides to making it happen. Anyway.

[00:36:39] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry to get really into the weeds here, but yeah. Timberlize on a podcast with a Linux-loving suck. Yeah. Well, now you know. So in the Hall of Fame is really fascinating because it is kind of a time capsule of how like certain eras where the site was super popular. For example, the most active story of all time, according to the Hall of Fame page, Kerry concedes election to Bush. So there you go. Another one of the top ones is strike on Iraq. Barack Obama wins U.S. presidency.

[00:37:09] Six bomb blasts around central London. Equal time for creationism. Because if you remember, that was the whole deal back in the early 2000s. There was the under the science dot slash dot dot com header. The intelligent design debate, which of course kicked off an entire month's long threads on these sites. After two years and 300,000 pages. Yeah. Is God libertarian? Yeah. Equal time for creationism. Creationist textbook stickers declared unconstitutional. The pseudoscience of intelligent design.

[00:37:38] So three separate creationism articles. Plus Saddam Hussein arrested discussion for the Michael Moore documentary Fahrenheit 9-11. And what's keeping you on windows are the most active stories of all time. Whereas the most visited stories of all time are very different. You can kind of see a theme here. Can cow backpacks reduce global methane emissions is one. IBM wants Linux is the other. IBM already had Linux. It was called AIX. Don't start with me.

[00:38:06] Slash dot infringing on Microsoft patent number US58190132. I had to pull that one up because like what? So according to anonymous coward. After reading that Microsoft successful attempt to patent style sheets. Which was a big web design thing. Cascading style sheets were how websites were built. Yeah. I tried typing the word Microsoft into the IBM patent server. It is amazing how many of these bloody things they are generating in the patent office.

[00:38:36] I selected a patent at random to see how novel it was. And just by chance I fell on this one. Filed May 15th 1996. Now it's no longer up on the site sadly. I tried to go to it directly. But they have 25 claims with this one patent. Mostly related to dragging and dropping command files in response to articles in online magazines. With each claim being successively more inclusive. But the 25th one.

[00:39:02] A subscriber system for use with an electronic magazine that is distributed from a publisher to a subscriber. The subscriber system comprising. A computer having a communications port coupled to a back channel to the publisher. A processor and a display. A graphical user interface executing on the processor to present a magazine screen on the display. The magazine screen containing at least one article indicative of a magazine article.

[00:39:26] And the graphical user interface configured to relate time within a publishing period for the magazine to the article boxes. So that when a user manipulates the graphical user interface to selectively identify different times in the publishing period. Ones of the article boxes are added and removed to demonstrate which articles were published at which times. So this headline slash dot is infringing on this patent because a browser goes to the website. The browser displays the web page and people click back and forth between issues of slash dot. Jesus Christ.

[00:39:54] It's such a broad patent that they're joking that it could apply to the website that you're currently reading. And so people are commenting on that. Very active. So I do love that you may like to read the related. The one that I love is Scott Adams. Scott Adams. Quite of the Dill Book comic strip dies at 68. Yep. I don't know why I had my BBC One voice there, but they buried him in a Dill Burrito. Yep. Yep.

[00:40:22] Along the way, when the Slashdot partnership with SourceForge came about. This was about 2015 or so. Was very critical of Slashdot itself. So this is DanLew.com. And what he's saying is people have been wary of SourceForge ever since they added a feature to allow projects to opt into adware bundling. But you could at least claim that projects are doing it by choice.

[00:40:45] But now that SourceForge is clearly being malicious, meaning this previous article had mentioned that SourceForge was taking over admin accounts for existing projects and injecting adware into installers for packages like things like an open source Photoshop clone called GIMP. SourceForge has a long history of this, but they used to be opt-in.

[00:41:04] Now, because SourceForge had a ownership or a partnership agreement with Slashdot, stories about it were buried, according to DanLew, anytime they were posted to Slashdot. How is it possible that someone, he writes, somewhere, thinks that censoring SourceForge's adware bundling on Slashdot is a net positive for Slashdot Media, the holding company that owns both Slashdot and SourceForge?

[00:41:30] A quick search on either Google or Google News shows that the story has already made it to a number of major tech publications, making the value of suppressing that story nearly zero in the best case. And in the worst case, this censorship will create another dig moment where readers stop trusting the mods and move on to sites that aren't as heavily censored. The dig moment that he links to is an article from Slashdot saying dig was censoring certain stories because of advertisers.

[00:42:00] Yeah, wasn't it the fucking the one like super user that Mr. Baby Man or some shit? Yes, it was Mr. Baby Man. That's right. God, yeah. I remember like 20 years ago, man. Fucking dig. Mm-hmm. Huge. Enormous. It is hard to think if there is, I mean, I think there are things that have a bigger footprint on the internet now, but like a website that had that much cultural cachet.

[00:42:24] So one last thing to read you at, this is 2013, Timothy B. writing for the Washington Post about Slashdot founder Rob Malda. He talks about his personal experience. When I was a computer science student in college, everyone I knew read Slashdot. The site was created by Rob Malda, an undergraduate at Hope College, a liberal arts college in Michigan, a Christian liberal arts college in Michigan, by the way. That fact is usually buried. He ran Slashdot until 2011.

[00:42:48] Then after taking a year off, he joined Wapo Labs, a technology incubator owned by the Washington Post company, parent company of the Washington Post. Wapo Labs is not among the companies being purchased by Jeff Bezos. He spoke to Malda. So he says Slashdot grew out of his personal blog, but you didn't call it blogging in 97 because blogging didn't exist then. It grew out of mailing lists and IRC channels. He found things he liked him to write about him. People ask me, why were you successful?

[00:43:17] The thing I tell them is no bullshit. I never had to fake what I was doing because this is just what I was doing. These are the people I was hanging out with. These are the things I was doing for fun. I was completely embedded inside of it because it was my hobby. It was what I did for fun. I don't understand how reporters for a newspaper can say, now you're in charge of France. That doesn't click with me. I would be terrible at reporting on France. I don't know anything about it. The tech stuff was mine. I lived it. How did you know Slashdot might take off?

[00:43:44] My joke answer is I wasn't sure about it until about five years ago, which would have been nine years after the site was founded. One night we were sitting in my living room, myself and several other Slashdot folks, and we were tailing Apache logs and we were doing DNS lookups on IPs, monitoring who was visiting the site. And we said, oh my God, someone from Microsoft is reading. Someone from Stanford is reading. Oh my God, here's someone in France. We had a really active user from the South Pole for a long time. They realized that like, that is, I think for people that are of that era,

[00:44:14] that were doing something on the internet either because like they thought it was fun or interesting or, you know, felt productive. You know, just something that was like for them and like 30 other people, you know, like a small, you know, small community, like things like that. And then like it starts to resonate. Folks, the ripples in the water. And all of a sudden you're, you know, it fucking takes off. You know, I'm fucking old. So are you. We're both dying. We're tearing in the dust. I don't feel so good. Mr. Stark. Yeah.

[00:44:44] Classic. Classic. But it is, you know, sometimes interesting when, well, you've got your fucking, your teenage kids. Right. Will probably say something and, and they have no idea that like, yeah, it's a riff on Chris Chan from 2007. Yeah. Or that's something from a fucking Starcraft chat log in 99. It is strange. White throat chip. Yeah. Then who was phone? I can actually see one of your kids chasing the other through the house screaming white throat chip. White throat chip.

[00:45:15] Then who was phone? But I mean, there's still people on Facebook to this day that are posting the guy sticking the remote up his ass. I think Commander Taco has an interesting way out of this. Rob, when asked, he's asked the question, anybody have the potential to be the next thing? He says, I don't think it's going to work that way anymore. I think that the power has decentralized.

[00:45:45] Successful people on Twitter, again, this is 2015, basically can fulfill a lot of the same role. You can follow Tim O'Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee, and you can get a pretty good summary of what's happening around the universe. But I think Twitter is fundamentally broken in certain regards. You got a lot of meek, yoker stuff along with that. Everyone thinks they're interesting.

[00:46:07] Part of the value of Slashdot was I could rate limit it down to a few things a day and still leave you with a sense you have pretty good sense of what was happening during the day. But if you follow 50 people, that is an epic time commitment. So I'm not sure that there is a clear error parent. There's power in what Reddit does and what Hacker News does and to a lesser extent what sites like Slashdot still do. But the power has shifted to individuals.

[00:46:35] My concern is still that the tools aren't really there yet to make that as good of an experience. I don't feel like I get as good an experience out of Twitter as I got out of a good mailing list and an IRC chatroom and Slashdot 15 years ago. It's different, chattier. I get more pictures of what people ate. It doesn't necessarily bring people insight. And then immediately, what tech topics are you most interested in right now? Bitcoin.

[00:47:05] To me, that kind of sums it up. It was a different time pre-Twitter. Why isn't there going to be that? Well, because it's just not the world. Yeah, and now there's only five websites. I mean, they got sold to Dice.com, the job website. Dice then sold them. The two sites were sold to BizX LLC, a.k.a. the DHI Group. A whole mess. A whole mess.

[00:47:31] But the long and short of it is that there were some interesting meta memes that came from the site. The site was just an aggregator for news, right? But headlines, much like they would on FARC.com, took on some common linguistic traits. A popular meme is, in Soviet Russia, noun verb you, which is itself a Yakov-Shmirnov riff. Oh, he's going to be at a flyover comedy fest this year. Of course he is. It is. I'm going to hunt him down for sport. That's right.

[00:48:00] I'm coming for you, Yakov, you son of a bitch. I'm coming for you. So, a lot of common ones, of course, were like, imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. For those of you who don't know what a Beowulf cluster is, it's a computer cluster in a small local area network. It's just a big high-performance computer. But does it run Linux? BSD is dying, which common, common referred to. When numbers are quoted, people will comment that that number happens to be the combination on their luggage. Of course, they riff from Spaceballs.

[00:48:28] Slash daughters often use the abbreviation TFA, which stands for The Fucking Article, or RTFA, Read the Fucking Article. In computer parlance, for those of you who are not, you know, inside kids, RTFM is short for Read the Fucking Manual. And so, Read the Fucking Article. You commented without reading the article linked in the main story. They did like the 2006 series of tubes comment from Ted Stevens, the U.S. Senator.

[00:48:56] All stories of Microsoft were once identified with a graphic of Bill Gates looking like Locutius of Borg from Star Trek Next Generation. They did a lot of riffs on Duke Nukem forever. Yeah, the internet. The internet, yeah. I'm here to upvote comments and chew bubblegum, and I'm all out of bubblegum. That's right. It did get a Chinese clone called Solidot. Solidot. Gonna walk right past that song.

[00:49:24] My co-host looks like Xi Jinping. I do not. Xi Jinping cannot grow a beard. My ex was obsessed with the idea that he's gotta be Asian. I'm not. I don't know where this is. Yeah, okay, I drink a little bit and I get a little, you know, but it's fun. You're always apologizing to your wife. Yeah. That's very Asian code. Come in this thing, come in this thing, you know. Yeah. Bowling all the time.

[00:49:54] Your wife's hitting you with her house shoes. Screeching at me in Mandarin. She knows I don't speak the fucking language. But yeah, Slashdot, news for nerds, things that matter. Still going strong. Still going strong. Jesus. I know. And I think, I mean, as long as the users are there, just like Fark, I think they'll get through. I think that Slashdot and Fark and those kind of news aggregator sites, as Drew Curtis mentioned in that thing I talked about earlier, they're getting hit hard by a lot of the same shit.

[00:50:22] The pivot to video has been a difficult thing. They've really weathered a lot with the AI stuff. But yeah, it is a strange time to be an aggregator of news because now, as Drew Curtis mentions, people search a news story and then they get the AI summary and they stop reading. They don't go to Dig or Fark or they don't go to Slashdot. So it's maybe because Slashdot is a little bit more nerdy. Old school niche. Yeah, and it's kind of siloed that maybe it'll have a little bit more staying power.

[00:50:50] But yeah, I mean, how many times was it acquired over the past, you know, 20 years? Who knows? The future is up in the air, but for now we'll enjoy it while it lasts. Speaking of enjoying it while it lasts, I guess that means it's time for us to tell the people at home where to find us on the old internet. If you want to help me dig up kimchi, you can find me over on Twitter. Twitter, blue sky, at iShotGyDboard, I-S-H-O-T-G-U-Y-D-B-O-R-D.

[00:51:19] You can find me over on Instagram at amusicphotographer. You can find my well-curated portfolio of people with their mouths open over at amusicphotographer or assholemusicphotographer. There we go. assholemusicphotographer.com. Yeah, it is assholemusicphotographer.com, right? Can we look it up? No, I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I think that's it. Yeah, who fucking did it? Where can you find me on the internet? Good question. Most of the time I'm going to be video crime.

[00:51:48] V-I-D-E-O-C-R-I-M-E. Anywhere there's a video crime, chances are that's me. We're talking Twitter, Blue Sky Letterboxd. You know, that type of thing. You can also find me as part of a podcast. It's not this one. It's called Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals. There I play a fictionalized version of my man, your man, the man, horror icon Stephen King. That's midnight-pals.simplecast.com. Or search Midnight Pals anywhere podcasts are sold. You can get a hold of this show in a number of ways.

[00:52:16] My personal favorite is the telephone 314-246-9766. That's 314-AHOY-PU. If you like to spell with your telephone, give us a call. Tell us what your favorite slash dot memory is or what your favorite, I don't know, kimchi recipe is. So let's do that. If you don't like to perhaps make phone calls, that's fine. You can always shoot us an email. Jason at the number 4, the number 8, Minutes of Dogs Barking dot com. Or Brian with a Y at the number 4, the number 8, Minutes of Dogs Barking dot com. Shoot us an email.

[00:52:46] Let us know what you thought of the show. Your reviews matter very much to us. We live and die by them. For good or ill. Yeah! You can also support the show, Patreon.com slash 4, 8 Minutes of Dogs. There you will find our post-show hangout called Thanks I Hate It and a bunch of other stuff. Probably the best value in podcasting these days is to join someone's Patreon because you get extra content. Hashtag content. Hashtag relatable. Hashtag SAO. That's again. Hashtag pork chop sandwich. Yes.

[00:53:15] That's Patreon dot com slash 4, 8 Minutes of Dogs. Well, as we always say at this time, namaste, good luck, give mommy a good gut fucking 25th Amendment. Now who ate all the pussy and hey, eat the knife. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right.