angst_ridden

Sure, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But this claim is not so extraordinary. It's just against what was (at one time) the common wisdom.

Extraordinary claims would be that humans were in this location far earlier than previous evidence suggested and they had mastered flight or were doing calculus or something.

What I miss is the ability to throw together a simple stand-alone (denormalized) relational database application in minutes. When Uncle Roy wanted something to track his LPs and search them by artist, musician, whatever, it was literally just an hour from concept to sending him a stack he could use. Same when Mom wanted a recipe database she could search by ingredient. Could I build them a web app today? Of course! And the database would be properly 3rd normal form and all that. But it would take a many hours, it would not be stand-alone (I’d need to host it somewhere for them), and they couldn’t change it to meet their needs. There are a lot of “toy” standalone database applications that people would like to have, but the barrier to creating them means they don’t get built. I miss the ability to throw together something with very little effort. (Of course, modern expectations are higher too. A standalone desktop app user will also want a phone version with database sync. Now we’re talking about a much more substantial technical problem.)

That, and record corporate profiteering.

If you look at the study itself, the accuracy was pretty poor. They hype it up, but it was only marginally better than random (a correlation of r=.13).

So, pretty much bullshit.

I worked with Peter Spronck and created the last add-ons and a few quests to Space Trader (e.g. The Scarab). I miss those days!

“So, naturalists observe, a flea Has smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bite ’em; And so proceed ad infinitum.” — Swift

I don't think that gets around the code licenses. They may use it as if it does, but I'm not convinced that would hold up if soemone were wealthy enough to make a court case.

I suspect you're right.

Even though even permissive licenses like MIT and BSD require attribution and preservation of copyright notices. Maybe their AI just can't "reliably detect" licenses.

I'm curious how they get around licenses. For example, I have repos that show up in The Stack. Some have licenses that require inclusion of the copyright in any source re-use or redistribution.

IANAL, but it seems like inclusion in the data set and subsequent distribution without the copyright notice would be a violation.

Definitely! I revisit these every decade or so, and each time I think "wow, I really didn't get this the last time I read it."

It’s not direct disruption.

Grassroots organizers use FB and messenger and Insta for “get out the vote” communications. People use these services to goad their friends to go and vote. People use FB as a search engine to identify their polling place.

I’m seeing a lot of non-FB services down too. Mostly AWS-based, but not all. My original conspiracy thoughts (this being Super Tuesday in the US) are giving away to thinking it’s some low level routing issue.

As others have said: encryption. Even before they supported full-disk encryption, I made it a habit of making yearly encrypted disk image files where I store all my financial and medical data. I open them when working on the info, close them afterwards. Even some attack that somehow bypassed disk encryption (like a browser hack or something) won't get anywhere.

For my high-school civics class final project, I wrote a 2d-scroller on the TRS-80 in assembler. The game was a map of the high school, and you had to avoid the "losers," "socs," and teachers, and steal supplies from various classrooms, culminating in stealing stuff from the chemistry labs and blowing up the school.

Obviously, 198x was a different time.

I got an A on the assignment.

I have the code somewhere, but I fear even at this late date I'd get thrown in prison if I were to release it.

Oh, and who can forget the “splash page flash movie” that you had to sit through? It was vital that the brand got to show you their vibe before you could access any actual information…

I knew a guy who bought several expensive sports cars as testament to his ability to do shockwave animations back in ‘97.

Oh, and remember the glory of Frames!?

How many hours did I spend slicing images in Photoshop and coding tables with rowspans?

Funny that coding HTML email is still not far from that experience (table-based layouts) if you want it to work in email clients like desktop Outlook.

As a frequent pedestrian in Los Angeles, the hierarchy of people being absolutely furious at me for walking on the sidewalks or using crosswalks goes (in decreasing order of rage): 1. Pickup/SUV drivers 2. Luxury car drivers 3. Other automobile drivers 4. Cyclists with fancy bikes and cycling gear 5. Dog walkers who are paying attention to their phone, not their dog 6. Ordinary cyclists 7. Pedestrians staring at their phones

In the 80s, I played “Dungeon” (predecessor to Zork) on an accoustic-coupled teletype my dad brought home from JPL. It was running on one of the PDP-11s there. An intern from Caltech had altered the text of Dungeon so the story took place in the area (Flood Control Dam #3 was moved into Arroyo Seco). I went though a lot of fan-fold paper.

Gotta be careful with domain names! After one drunken binge in the 90s, I ended up maintaining andthehorseyourodeinon.com for years.

Being in excellent health can increase the required pathogen dose, and help resist illness. It can also, paradoxically, cause worse results. See, for example, “cytokine storm.”

I'm an old man, and pretty much my entire adult life, we've had fusion energy as being "just ten years away."

Given this is the era of zero-consequence big lies, Nucor and Helion just shifting the horizon a bit to greenwash their operations.

I'll see it when I believe it.

Copper sprays are a common anti-fungal and anti-bacterial used for fruit trees.

I don't think it's an electrical thing in this context, but that doesn't rule out some other effect.

That works too. I call it "proper" because it removes one step before I have coffee, which, no matter how trivial, is a big deal for me in the morning.

Interesting about the filter. I prefer super dark roast, Italian espresso-grind coffees. The paper filters give me a much smoother brew. Of course, as you say, taste is entirely subjective! I'm envious, because I'd rather have just one reusable filter rather than go through a stack of paper discs each year.

Proper storage is just pulling the plunger out entirely.

Every few years, soaking the rubber seal in mineral oil overnight then cleaning will restore flexibility (otherwise it shrinks over time, reducing the quality of the seal).

Unrelated: using paper filters is less eco-responsible than the gold foil filter, but makes for better coffee.

I wonder if this might be misleading. A lot of Los Angeles’ (LADWP) electricity has traditionally been generated generated by coal-fired plants in other states. I’d have to dig into more recent sources to see if that’s still the case, and whether that’s reflected in this dataset.

(Edit: read the sources list, and that should be reflected, but the map is not displaying heavy imports to SoCal. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d suspect LADWP obscuring sources in the published data).

Yes, but after mass extinction, stuff won't just stop.

Eventually, things will evolve to forests or the equivalent. You'll be unlikely to have the same kinds of dinosaurs as before, but as the old saying goes, nature like carcination. There will probably be new variants of crabs.

When it starts seriously affecting the oligarchs.

Back in the 90s, I helped clean out the apartment of a Holocaust survivor. She'd been taken out of a death camp for a labor camp, and nearly starved.

There was food stashed all over the apartment. Like you mention, canned food in odd places, hard candies hidden everywhere imaginable, boxes of crackers behind books on the shelves, etc. Also, small caches of coins or other valuables.

It was both impressive and pathetic.

Yup. I know someone whose father was the son of refugees who lost everything and whose mother's family lost everything the Great Depression.

By the time this person was born, both parents had good income, but they continue to live as if in poverty (extreme frugality, never replace anything if they can spend 10x more time/money to repair, dumpster diving, etc).

The parents are low-level hoarders. The child is even more so.

It seems born of the trauma and uncertainty.

Had a related thing, back when landlines were expensive. A roommate went off on Peace Corps to Sierra Leone for a year, and I inherited her landline.

A telemarketer called asking for her, and I said "oh, she'll be in Africa for a year." The marketer had a minor meltdown. Evidently, he had been close to the end of his rope already, and this (honest) answer pushed him that much closer. "Don't mock me. Just hang up or say she's not taking calls," he begged me.

This is when I finally realized I didn't need to be honest with telemarketers. Subsequently, whenever I'd get a call asking for her, I'd try to come up with more and more exotic reasons she couldn't answer the phone. Since her name was not pronounced the way the spelling suggested it might be, it was easy to know whether the caller knew her or not, and I could respond accordingly.