I grew up in a diplomatic family (parents were US Foreign Service). At the smaller posts, the camaraderie between the different diplomatic families was genuinely much warmer than the cold-war era relations would have you believe. I have good memories of the time.
It's hard to overstate how much computers improved with each generation back then. Going from, say, an IBM XT or AT to an Amiga has no modern parallel. It was mind-blowing, exhausting, and exhilarating all at once.
I have a 3090Ti, And it is still plenty performant for all the stuff I do. Especially considering modern pricing, I don't see me swapping for anything newer for a long time to come.
They aren't, at least not yet. It's more a reflection of how bad internet service is in places you wouldn't think it would be, at least here in the states. My as-advertised gigabit cable service slows to an utter crawl around Netflix O'Clock, And multi-hour+ outages are a regular occurrence.
Regarding latency, starlink satellites are low enough that it just isn't an issue.
I live in the suburbs in the bay area in California, and starlink offers a significantly better quality of service than charter spectrum cable service, which is my only other option. Considering the current state of our government, I don't see things improving anytime soon.
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
--Charles Babbage
Blind trust in the machine for a certain type of user seems to be endemic since the beginning.
I have about 15,000 hours on my Bambu x1c, and it's been fantastic. Their customer service has been great, too; the couple of times that I've had service issues, the tech genuinely worked with me to solve the problem. They were a lot nicer about it than the times I had to contact prusa about my older i3. FWIW.
That is a fantastic example of mesoamerican script. I would have naively assumed it was Maya had you not said otherwise otherwise, too. Thanks for posting it.
“I’ve told you before, Daniel: roach isn’t an insult. We’re the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, we’re the ones with the stripped-down OS’s so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We’re the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.”
Completely arrested? I don't. But it appears to be arrested in ways that matter for mental acuity, for now. I've taken care of a parent with Alzheimer's, and helped several other caregivers over the years with their own family's journeys, and one thing I can tell you is that I have never, ever seen an actual halting of the progression for this long. The descent is usually a stairstep pattern, but the steps are on the matter of weeks to a month or two. My friend has been stable for a year.
This is all new. There is research hinting at Alzheimer's subtypes, some of which are more likely to respond than others. Even halting the decline is a huge potential breakthrough.
I know two people who have been taking the new monoclonal antibody treatment for it. One who was a bit further along when she started, and did not show any significant improvement. The one who started while she was still in the early stages has completely arrested her descent. She hasn't recovered much of what she already lost, but she's still able to live independently and enjoy life, and her mental acuity scores are (slightly) better than they were last year. That's a hell of a thing.
Just a heads up, don't go in to Echopraxia expecting it to feel like Blindsight. When I first read it, I was actually pretty disappointed overall, and a few of my friends had similar reactions.
Over a couple of years a few re-reads, though, I've come to enjoy it perhaps even more that Blindsight, but in a completely different way. It fills out a lot of the posits opened in the first novel, without coming to specific conclusions, but it gives you a lot to think about.
I used to get the poor kid's meal when I was very young. They made us stand as a group aside in a line and let all the other kids get their full-sized meals first, then would give us our half-sized shitty sandwich after everyone else walked passed and stared at us.
Fuck every single adult involved in that kind of cruelty.
That being said- the bit of light in this story is the lunch ladies who went out of their ways to sneak us extra when it was available, even though I know they got in trouble for it. I managed to give one a hug once, and the strength she hugged me back, I knew she meant it. I have nothing but love and gratitude for those women.
I don't really disagree with anything you've said, but I still feel a warm spot in my heart from projects like this. I still have (and use!) my HP48SX from my high school days, and it still works like it always has. There is something to be said for a device's limitations, and I mean that honestly. It's very powerful for what it is, but its processing limitations keeps me from overextending, which is something very easy to do with the pocket supercomputers we've all gotten used to carrying around over the previous decade. (And its keys are simply a delight to press compared to even the best glass touchscreen.)
Ripley being the survivor was a rug pull on the audience's expectations. Tom Skerritt (Dallas) was a well-known actor at the time, and would have been assumed to have been the default lead.
When I turned 50 I started capping my max weights because I was more worried about long-term joint and ligament health than ultimate strength. I no longer lift above two plates (225lbs) for anything, even though that is well below my deadlift, squat, etc.
It's been a couple years, now, and honestly I wish I'd made the change sooner. I haven't lost any functional strength, and my recovery is a lot smoother. Haven't had any injury since, either.
Not Google related, but cognition and older relative relevant: The amount of predatory scamware targeted towards older adults on the app stores is infuriating. I have a family friend who is now in the early-mid stages of Alzheimer's, but is still able to live at home and enjoy her life. She gets confused and stressed out by the fake 'alert! all your photos will be deleted!!' ads that pop up when she does her adult coloring books or jigsaw puzzles on her ipad. Apple's recommended apps in this category are evil in this regard, every single one. I've had to disable $80/week 'security' subscriptions from her account more than once. It is shameful that this is allowed.
As someone who tried those kickstarter specials... They just aren't there unless you use a laser-based system, which are many thousands of dollars. You'll get a point cloud that is close-ish for whatever part you're scanning, but unless it's strictly decorative, you're going to find pretty quickly that it's faster to just re-create the thing from scratch if you need any kind of dimensional accuracy. The scans are somewhat useful as on-machine references, but that's it.
Also, scanning is a lot more work than you'd naively think. Reflections are the enemy, the matte spray used for scan prep is messy and expensive. It was fun to play around with, and I learned a lot, but my current advice is don't bother, you'll just be disappointed.
Years ago I lived in an apartment where the vent hood above the range was an overpowered commercial unit instead of the usual home stuff. It genuinely surprised me how much of a difference it made compared to 'normal' vent hoods. Higher extraction volumes, even without side walls, makes a big difference.
There are definitely a few engine designs out there that won the design lottery in terms of longevity. I know a guy that has close to half a million miles on a Jeep Cherokee with the old AMC 4-liter straight six, and the only engine work done other than plugs and wires is replacing the water pump at 250k. I've got ~186k on my Jeep with the same engine, and it doesn't even burn any oil yet.
Interesting. I never knew there was a name for this phenomena. It happened to me every now and then as a kid, too, usually when I was sick and in bed. In my case, it made me feel vertigo, like size scales were shifting around so fast I'd lose my balance and fall over, stuff like that, but I don't remember any particular fear reaction per se, other than feeling kind of gross when it happened. I found that dim light (like a nightlight in a child's bedroom, with long shadows) was the worst trigger, and either bright light or complete darkness helped avoid it.