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And if you believe that, you'll believe anything.

See also: Twitter's csam/revenge porn generator. Pervert market is apparently big right now.

While that may have been the original motivator, they have largely settled into a niche as a sort of fitness sensor. People do not typically use apps on them.

Can we just get Robert Scoble to come back and destroy these, please?

This isn’t a case of “made a mistake”/“did something incorrectly”, though. This is “knowingly broke the rules”. They had a policy against using our benevolent robot overlords to generate slop.

And fabricating quotes is pretty high up there in the list of things that journos should never, ever do.


I mean I think a lot of it is that they're not _really_ forcing it upon people. I think I've declined it maybe twice over the last two years. Meanwhile, Google are trying to crowbar bloody gemini in _everywhere_, and I gather Microsoft is doing ditto.

It's for this audience: https://www.theregister.com/2009/09/14/verity_stob_abigails_...

(Microsoft _actually_ encouraged 'fans' to have Windows 7 Launch Parties...)


This is fun.

> There are of course other very minor changes. For instance, Gandalf tells Bilbo to bring out the chicken and tomatoes in the unrevised edition vs. the chicken and pickles in the revised edition. But I'll skip over these inconsequential changes.

Bit of medievalism there (tomatoes being a Colombian Exchange thing).


He knew about the umbrella and kept it in. It’s more likely Tolkien was concerned with the date and whether fresh tomatoes would be available than medievalism.

And yet he went on to include potatoes in LotR.

There's something so fundamentally European about potatoes, despite being (comparatively) new there. And British in particular. They're stodgy, bland, filling, comforting, and really tasty in a dull way. They displaced things like turnips, which had too much flavor and a dispiriting watery texture.

He could so easily have written that passage for turnips, but it would have been less comforting. (It is often read as if the word "potato" was used to translate some extinct native-European root vegetable, but I find that doubtful.)


That's a retcon. There was no indication that he was a hobbit in The Hobbit (and as others have mentioned, in the original there was no physical description at all.)

https://www.theonering.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/The-Ho...

This version says it’s the 1937 edition. It has the pre change story about Gollum offering the ring which Tolkien said is what he changed. But it also says he was a small slimy creature.


Neither the "before" nor "after" here have "small slimy"

https://www.ringgame.net/riddles.html


Yeah it's entirely possible the version that I have that is supposed to be from 1937 was tainted with later versions despite it not containing any of the more well known 1951 changes. That is maybe someone reconstructed it by taking a 1966 copy and undoing the changes, but forgot about the small slimy creature change.

But apparently there were dozens of different versions that actually ended up in print that had different amounts of the changes caused by some printers mixing old plates and new. So it's entirely possible that small slimy appeared in some versions around 1951 but not others and that's what that page is working off of.


On this 'ere orange website, we don't read the article.

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