I’m speculating, but my guesses are:

• Gathering enough karma to post on subreddits that have a minimum threshold.
• Getting enough post and comment history to pass a casual inspection, either by human moderators or spam filters.
• Maturing the account to the point where it can be sold to another shady company.
• Generally having a lot of bot accounts ready, just in case.

Once mature, it’s usually used for spam or astroturfing. There is a noticeable uptick around big elections, wars, etc.

I saw one repost-bot that metastisized into the most vile porn-spam-bot you can imagine, but they’re usually more subtle than that.

They’re indistinguishable because they’re copied from top-voted posts that are a few years old (title, text, and image if applicable). It’s guaranteed to produce a post that fits the community and gets a lot of engagement, so it’s a cheap and effective way to mature a bot account. Once you start looking for it, it’s everywhere, and Reddit admins don’t care.

UTC is better than most, but leap seconds are still awful. Computers should use GPS or TAI everywhere. Dealing with time zones and leap seconds is for human readability and display purposes only.

CBOR for life, down with JSON.

US Army logistics catalogs are organized this way. “Cookies, oatmeal” instead of “Oatmeal cookies” because it’s a lot easier to find what you need an a giant alphabetical list.

That’s weird, the watermark says, “I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.”

It’s a matter of trust. This is just the latest in a long and increasing train of Microsoft abusing their market power. They have proven, time and again, that they cannot be trusted.

Anyone who tries to pull an “I have altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further” gets a lifetime boycott.

Krazam has previously documented the Facegoog microservices architecture in some detail.

My head canon is that Tony Stark has a superpower: everything he builds works the first time.

If it’s really complicated, like an entirely new Iron Man suit, then it might malfunction once in an amusing way. Then he tightens a screw and it’s perfect. It never fails outright or bricks itself.

In my experience, this is not how hardware or software development goes. I want this power so much.

This post is horrifying, not funny.

Q, the guy from Star Trek?

Plane falls out of sky, find DNA, assume person is dead? You just got fooled by the oldest trick in the book. i.e., The reason Bane does a quick blood transfusion at the start of Dark Knight Rises.

Is it the one about pooping? click Yup.