Oh, I was just making a cheap joke. I used Telegram for a while for a specific group, and in that time I was inundated with catfishing bot messages. The joke was that that’s the purpose of Telegram and if you’re doing any else on it, you’re misusing it.
It was a very funny joke.
They’ve done a really amazing job of convincing the world that this is an encrypted messaging app.
This is a play on people’s naivety. It is an encrypted messaging app in as much as regular messages are encrypted between the client and the server. It’s just that this achieves nothing for the user in terms of privacy unless you can both completely trust the provider (you shouldn’t) and be confident that the back-end can’t be compromised (you can’t).
They do also have “secret chats” that are apparently E2E encrypted, but you’d be mad at this point to give them the benefit of the doubt without at least looking at independent security audits of the client.
Were you using it to catfish strangers via DM? If you weren’t, maybe they banned you for misuse of the platform.
When Lucas first sketched one out to give early collaborators a sense of what he wanted to make, he wrote “TIE” next to it without knowing what it would stand for (or so the story goes). Crew speculated that he’d already thought it looked a little like a bow tie and he hadn’t found the right backronym yet; apparently concept artist Joe Johnston proposed “twin ion engine”.
In what way do you feel you’re helping or being constructive with this comment? Who’s it targeted at, and for what effect?
came from humbul-be and merged with Middle English bombeln
As you’ve said, in both senses it’s related to the sound they make. “Bumble” on its own, in the sense of clumsy, meandering movement, is probably unrelated but I guess it’s plausible that it also had an influence on the mutation of “humbul” to “bumble” even if the latter was primarily about the noise.
Reported it
The Neighbourhood Watch will get it sorted!
(I kid – for the unaware reader, they’re invasive, they threaten native bees, and you can report sightings to the government).
They’re big for sure, but there’s some forced perspective in that photo. They’re typically substantially smaller than your little finger.
The logo is from Marvel comics. Schmidt is a Nazi SS Obergruppenführer in charge of special weapons development; his division is known as Hydra and is the revival of an ancient cult. After a drug-induced mutation, Schmidt is known as the Red Skull.
Don’t ask me any more questions, though; I’ll have already forgotten everything I just read!
Let’s hope it never meets the emotional support cat-in-shining-armor.
Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, Bat Individual!
there MUST be a Kythera Mechanism lurking out there
Kythera is a much bigger island to search, give it time.
It’s also Microsoft’s get-out-of-jail-free card here; someone else ripped the ebooks, processed them, and uploaded them under a CC0 Public Domain license. “How were we meant to know the release wasn’t authorized?”
I agree that CoMaps and similar apps don’t have the feature set that signed-out Google Maps users are losing in this move by Google, so it’s not totally relevant.
I don’t agree with just calling CoMaps a navigation app in the sense of “how do I get to Point B”, though. In well-mapped areas it has business information including specifics about the shop/restaurant, opening hours, accessibility, payment methods, etc. It has points of interest that give information about a location’s history and culture, as well as ancillary information from Wikipedia/WikiData. It has information about green spaces, vehicles and bicycle parking, waterways, sports clubs and tracks/pistes, toilets and other public services, benches, water points, and a bunch more.
Bixby’s only visual representation was a lowercase “b” in negative space on blue leaf/teardrop shape. S Voice was a microphone. It’s never had a humanoid avatar.
Siri’s was a handwritten “Siri” with a green circle for the dot on the “I”; after Apple bought it, it was a microphone and then an abstract blue/purple design. It’s never had a humanoid avatar.
Google Now wasn’t stand-alone and didn’t have any particular design - the button was a microphone in the Google palette. Google Assistant got an abstract set of circles in the Google palette. It’s never had a humanoid avatar.
So I guess we’re just talking about Cortana, unless I’ve missed any notable ones?
(Edit: Alexa didn’t have an avatar; the logo was a lowercase “alexa” in the Amazon style with the smirking Amazon arrow. Evi had a plain circle with a dot and an arc, like a cyclopean emoji. Ivona was a headless service.)
79 symbols if you count punctuation, casing, and accents.
It’s satellite imagery, yes, but from an oblique (high off-nadir) angle. The imagery is from DigitalGlobe, who are now Maxar.
