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Not to mention that the bombs dropped on Japan were primitive and small fission bombs and pale in comparison to today's thermonuclear warheads.

To be fair, few could have anticipated that Tesla and Musk would be unaffected by valid scrutiny and criticism.

This is also addressed in the article:

> E. DON’T TRY TO SHORT SPACEX!!

> Elon Musk is a cult figure. Moreover, he has again and again proven himself immune to any meaningful market, legal, or regulatory scrutiny.

> Musk’s detractors have been correct about Tesla’s terrible fundamentals, its Full Self-Driving lies, its robotaxi fantasies, its shaky accounting. But when they have imagined these things might affect the stock price, they have been wrong.

Yes, while the article makes some good points the first paragraph was puzzling.

> Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further.

Yes, our new generation of overlords seem to be socially and emotionally stunted and exhibit an alarming naivete about the world. This worries me almost as much as the tech itself. It is impossible to predict the future but in the past when a ruling class completely disregarded the effects of their greed and excess on the wellbeing of society, at some point the bill came due and the consequences for them (and society) were dire.

May be too specific but as a European in the US, I would love to be able to see temperature in F and C at the same time!

> Bias towards action. Ship. …The quest for perfection is paralyzing.

Unfortunately for users this is more often used as an excuse to ship buggy / badly done software.

Nowhere is this urge (and the reward for it) stronger than HN. In the majority of comment sections, the top comment is one that pounces on a few words from the posted article, however tangential or self-serving.

I feel this so much.

I am always amazed how so many software engineers seem to dislike coding, which seems to be a major underlying theme in the AI-coding cheerleading.

Coding never feels tedious to me. Talking to a chatbot, now that’s tedious.

Yeah, I use goto all the time in C, mostly in the “goto cleanup before return” pattern but sometimes in jumping to different points of a loop. And I know I’m not the only one.

> The authors of the study also propose alternative ways of thinking about the dog-human bond, blending the characteristics of different human relationships – not only the child-parent relationship, but also friendship and partnership - resulting in a unique bond with its own dynamics.

This is only towards the end of the article but addresses what was bothering me throughout it all — that having dogs is only viewed here through the lens of how it relates to having children.

What if some people (like me) simply 1) like dogs 2) don’t want children, and there’s no link?

I love the Apollo 11 computer stories but by today’s standards it was more of an MCU than a computer. And sure, in the embedded space it is true that in a lot of cases error recovery doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and it makes more sense to reset quickly.

But there are many systems today that take a long time to restart so you can’t just abort if you have a chance to recover.

> These seats will increase passenger capacity on airlines by 20 per cent

> Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary […] wants his Boeing's 737 and 800 fitted with 10 rows of them, and 15 rows of traditional seats.

> Michael has suggested the standing tickets may potentially cost as little as £1 to £5.

According to Google, a 737 has a max seating capacity of 230.

Increasing that by 20% would be 46 seats more. So all this to take in around 50-230 pounds (or dollars, whatever) per flight?

It’s really not a book review either..

I posted this to give people an idea of what the article is and is not. I was disappointed how little of the actual letters there is in this 4000 word word salad.

> I discovered interesting music like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Portishead, Tricky, Orbital, Takako Minekawa, Hooverphonic, Poe, Veruca Salt all from sporadically listening to one college radio station in my hometown and, once a week, watching one music program on MTV (usually 120 Minutes or AMP). Then, once a month, I would sometimes flip through a music magazine while at the hair salon (usually Rolling Stone or Spin). And that was literally it.

This section contains two types of curation that have to be separated: college radio is good curation, it is nonprofit, done by people for the love of the medium and will help you broaden your horizon. Rolling Stone et. al. is bad curation, a form of gatekeeping really, very commercial, requiring lots of connections and resources to get featured in.

> wishful thinking that AI will stop before whatever they're good at

What is AI good at already — I mean apart from making a few people very rich and using tremendous amounts of resources to generate slop?

> The cynical view of America’s educational system—that it is merely a means by which privileged co-eds can make the right connections, build “social capital,” and get laid—is obviously on full display here. If education isn’t actually about learning anything, and is merely a game for the well-to-do, why not rig that game as quickly, efficiently, and cynically as possible? AI capitalizes on this cynical worldview, exploiting the view-holder and making them stupider while also profiting from them.

Accurate, as far as I can tell

Weather forecast is best told as a narrative and reducing it to a sports score like temperature / rainfall will always be problematic for many regions.

I’m in SF and I have not looked at a “TV/app style” forecast in years. Instead every morning I read:

https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?format=CI&glossary=...

During the day I look periodically at:

https://fog.today

If you were an immigrant with legal status who lives in the US, would you feel OK traveling? What precautions would you take, what information would you memorize?

Age is another differentiator. Take young men out of the equation and you get a much better picture.

Another interesting stat is that the majority of motorcycle crashes are single vehicle accidents, ie. the rider going down by themselves. While this can be equipment failure, in most cases this will be crashing due to riding too fast or above skill level.

So yes, riding very carefully at safe speeds and avoiding dangerous situations (I choose my routes to avoid situations where drivers are likely to be in their phone — mostly freeways and freeway-like streets in cities) will make bikes a lot more safe.

Tbh it’s not just nostalgia (at least for me). That machine (and related machines) had such a unique combination of limitations and possibilities that 35 years on, I still find a lot of inspiration in code and optimizations that were/are being written for C64 and are directly or indirectly applicable to programming today.

8 bit CPU with 16 bit address space, a simple assembly language, most peripherals accessible by modifying bytes in memory, coupled with a desire to show off and one up each other produced an absolute treasure trove of programming tricks and techniques. Coders regularly produce(d) results that on paper were not possible on C64.

Exactly this, though for me a lot of boilerplate is actually a comfort zone that I often look forward to, the way an athlete might to a light jog. Earbuds in, forget about everything, crank it out.

(That said your point is valid — there is boilerplate that is tedious and the resulting pain will be motivation to improve things)

> It's like having a thoughtful and impossibly fast colleague who's always available to help me develop and sharpen my ideas.

More like an absolute bumbling idiot of a colleague that you have to explain things over and over again and can’t ever trust to get anything right.

The hype is that “cloud” is and makes everything magically better / easier / more secure / more efficient etc. Many companies jumped head first into large-scale cloud migrations and buildouts without any thought about where and how “cloud” makes sense, what the risks / downsides / true costs are, etc. Just like they are doing now with AI.

I’m actually working on code for esp-idf / SSD1309 right now, a little bigger than the 1306. I went through a similar arc as OP.

I was actually surprised / disappointed by the poor quality of the drivers out there. If you instrument and log the bytes u8g2 sends to the device and how the buffer is sent, you see it’s pretty messy, inefficient and hacky. Seems like everyone copy+pasting everyone else’s code, without understanding fully.

So in the end I just decided to draw into a local buffer and then send that buffer in one single transaction to the display.

Once you figure out the data sheet it’s actually very easy to program these displays. For example, to test any SSDxxxx display, you need to send all of two bytes: 0xaf (display on), 0xa5 (all pixels on)

I am now looking at SSD1322, which is both grayscale and has enough internal RAM for two buffers for even smoother drawing (write into a non-displayed region of the RAM and then change the display offset)