drzaiusapelord

Wow thank you for this! Ive never heard of this. The early days were truly crazy.

I think its fair to say computers this simple couldn't really be sabotaged. You'd just power cycle them and they'd be back to the basic prompt (I dunno if this computer needed basic run from disk or it booted into it like a TRS-80). This is just like writing 10 Print "Microsoft!" and 20 Goto 10. I imagine in both cases pressing the break key, or similar, is all you need to end this loop anyway.

If the computer was just sitting at the basic prompt it wasn't doing anything anyway.

This analogy doesn't really work because car are inherently much much safer than jetpacks just by the virtue of the fact that an error or failure or accident is almost not fatal. 0.7 percent of car accidents are fatal. In serious plane accidents, what laypersons would call crashes, the fatality rate is about 55%. Which is actually not bad considering, but not imagine if a plane was instead not this highly regulated bus-like thing that makes set routes and piloted by only experts, but something anyone can buy and fly like a hypothetical consumer jetpack. How many jetpack accidents are something that don't result in dismemberment or death? It must be a low number.

From a safety perspective, you're going to be in a little bit of trouble because this hypothetical industry will have profiteers and customers that simply won't let you regular them much. Cars are a special case because nearly everyone rides in them so safety concerns (thank you Ralph Nader) are politically easy and the capital owning class have a hard time pushing back on stories of dead families in terrible accidents. The capital owning class finds it easy to push back against regulations on motorcycles, thus maximizing their profit, because even people into motorcycles don't want crumple-zones, roll-cages, big flashing lights, bumpers, etc because it hurts the aesthetic and experience they buy motorcycles for. Lets remember it took 60-70 years of motorcycle popularity before helmet laws got popular. That's a very slow regulatory burn.

So the jetpack is a lot more like a motorcycle. Even on well regulated roads full of safety devices they're still death traps because any vehicle without a "cage" is simply dangerous and impossible to be made safe. The NHTSA: For every mile traveled, motorcyclists have a risk of a fatal accident that is 35 times higher than a car driver.

So no, you probably can't car-ize a jetpack because a jetpack isn't a car. Its own unique mode of transportation and one without a cage and something inherently unstable. I imagine your best case scenario is many times the risk of motorcycles. This is why investors, the living arm of capitalism, refuse to mass-fund these deathtraps, but they'll fund any gimmicky crypto or social media thing. I don't think a successful jetpack company wouldn't want to car-ize it anyway. It would take away the appeal and the profit incentive would demand they continue to make them as sexily dangerous and performative as they can get away with to increase that appeal, thus sales.

You also have the larger regulatory and public safety issues drones have. They can't stay aloft without power and come crashing down without wings or autogyration to helps them down. So in populated areas it would be irresponsible to have these flying over the heads of people.

If you have free time, go ahead and visit /r/weirdwings or /r/weirdwheels. There's no shortage of "innovative" death-traps out there that failed to penetrate the market because they're just too dangerous.

Last but not least, single-person transportation tends to be the kiss of death anyway from both a practicality and cost perspective. People are social, have significant others, children, elderly to take care of, etc so the single-person vehicle has to be something you own ON TOP of owning a car or two. It doesn't replace cars, so a prospective buyer is someone who has to make car payments as well as jetpack payments. What percent of Americans can afford this vs people who can afford cars and the occasional airline ticket? Currently, an affordable jetpack is $200,000. If through the miracle of mass production you get that down to 1/2 or 1/3rd that, its still the cost of an expensive luxury car. What market are you appealing to even if you iron out some of the safety issues? Who is this unicorn who can afford this and would want it, especially considering the wealthy tend to be old men unfit to pilot something like this safely and with comfort, the same way the average Corvette driver isn't hot 20 something guys like in the movies, but older men close to retirement.

Google says the average age of a corvette owner is 61. Do you really want 61 year olds flying over your head in Iron Man cosplay that actually flies? Knowing full well if their arm muscles give out then their vector radically changes and more or less turns them into 70+mph human missiles aiming for the ground?

In a country that has traded efficient public transportation like intra-city light rail, trollies, and fast regional links for car culture, well, you're kinda stuck making car payments then. Not enough people can spend $100,000 on a jetpack the same way we all don't have a Cessna waiting for us as the local regional airport. The money ain't here even if you can fix safety and the absurdly low flight time of just a few minutes. The sci-fi fantasy of flying alone above a city is not only technically difficult, ridiculously dangerous, but economically impossible for all put the wealthiest.

I have a M1 in an entry-level Macbook Air I bought for $1000. Is Intel really having to compare its top of the line i9 to this chip now? Wow, I knew they were a bit behind but this is incredible. Price-wise, like you said, i9's are expensive.

Worse, the Microsoft ARM SQ1 in the Surface Pro X performs like 1/3rd the benchmark performance as the M1. I know synthetic benchmarks aren't very meaningful but we have some X's at work and I've played with them and they are all unusually and annoying slow while my Air feels like I'm using a high-wattage desktop.

The value of the M1 Macbook Air is pretty wild right now. The only thing keeping Intel's stock price above water is that Apple will never license this out to Windows laptop makers and Windows has monopolistic lock-ins so not everyone can just switch to Apple, especially businesses, so Intel is safe in the Windows world for now.

I read this is surprisingly common especially with older couples. People like to have their own space and when you get older comfort is more important because your body isn't what it used to be. Snoring, keeping separate hours, stealing blankets, freezing feet, etc. It all adds up. People don't need to sleep all night together to be a couple or to have sex. If anything, its kinda weird we are expected to share a bed and a room with someone else.

I'll be honest, if I had this setup, I think my previous relationship would have lasted longer. Its not for every personality and attachment type, but I think its for many.

What's the better relationship? The one where they each have their own personal space and aren't resentful over being kept up with snoring? Or the couple that toughs it out because they're supposed to?

I also think the long-tail economics of capitalism is about shrinking worker entitlements to enrich capital holders. Not too long ago you'd have a house with a spare bedroom or two or three. Now you're huddling in a condo or apartment that's 1bd or two, if you have kids. So we romanticize having less because its easier than challenging the system.

What happens is some organizations run a verifying to see if its a VOIP number, and if it is, considers it invalid for SMS based 2FA, and other authentication, presumably to stop hackers. Some big names use these lists, most notably Zelle to transfer money. Discord as well.

Why Google also seems to block incoming SMS from Microsoft Authentication and others is beyond me. Maybe MS isn't sending because it doesn't consider that number real and just fails silently on their end? Maybe Google's own lists are very aggressive. I suspect the latter because this comes up a lot. No one seems to have a good answer to any of this because there's no laws requiring transparency so they hide their rube-goldberg-esque SMS policies behind obscurity and its up to me, the customer, to somehow navigate this mess.

Yes, from regular people things are fine, but my life isn't dictated by regular people but the mega corporations capitalism creates and how I have to cater to their various technological whims. If my phone can't get messages because these big companies are always feuding in some way, then I'm locked out of essential services I need to live, have a job, do banking, etc. Its a small comfort that my friends can text me when I can't get texts from my bank, money transfers, or for work. As of right now in the USA, having a VOIP number be your primary phone number is unfeasible. I have a work cell with a "real" number that I use for at least 4 different services for SMS because of this issue.

Maybe this person is just one bad head injury from death where otherwise you and I with a similar injury would heal with hospitalization, or maybe just nurse a concussion for a day or two and be fine.

Its craziness all the way down. I have a google voice number which is my "default" number with my gmail accounts. All my gmail accounts were automatically migrated to use 2FA with this number which means if I lose all my google devices and I try to log into voice, I'll get 2FA I can't see because of the catch-22 situation of not being able to log into voice.

The only reason I caught this is because they send me a notice about 2FA and I thought, wait what 2FA am I using? Instead of them running a tiny check to see "Wait, is this person using a voice number" they did it anyway. Worse, they know this because if you go into the 2FA page manually it says in bold letters to not use a good voice number.

At this point I'm spooked and I'm just going to port my number into our account at work and have my work phone use this number instead of having a dual number phone with voice. Voice SMS is a mess too. 50% of services can't SMS it a code because Google blocks it. Other services won't accept it for SMS codes because its "not a real phone."

If I didn't catch this then there would have been a day where I'm locked out of my accounts with no apparent way back in.

The absurdity I like to point out sometimes (usually with a lot of downvotes when I talk about this on HN) is how capitalism corrupts nearly all. Countless employers sell their employees on the idea of "Learn meditation to help with work stress" instead of "Lets talk about by work is stressful and how we can fix that." The former just buzzword dishonesty, the latter something that could affect profits, and even if only .01% of profits spent to make workers lives 100% better it would be deemed unacceptable in capitalism. Even if the stinginess of the capital owning class could be curtailed, this reform still wouldn't be acceptable because it would be a win for workers, and keeping workers from rising up in any form is a prime feature of capitalism. Remember, the most perfect capitalist entity hires no one, pays no salaries, and only makes money for its owner. The second most perfect form uses slaves for labor. Due to a loss of a civil war, this is no longer possible here, but we certainly spilled a lot of blood trying to keep it for capitalism. Now quasi-slavery is how the game is played by making sure life's expenses keep people in line and making sure wages never get anyone independently wealthy. Some slip through but that's a bug not a feature.

Of course capitalism can't exist without the ego. Everyone here is, as they say, a temporary embarrassed millionaire. Everyone believes in the CEO as this force of nature who does all sorts of things, because the CEO is crafty enough to steal credit from his underlings as self-marketing. Characters like John Galt are seen as realistic and people defend Rand's writing with a straight face. Capitalism is the ego's playground so of course, Buddhism translated here is littered with narratives that protect capitalism.

I also find it a little amusing at how casually we recommend meditation as a self-help tool for workers to be more productive. If done correctly, it should do the opposite.

Also this excellent piece explaining how the Pali canon refutes California Buddhism's "we are all one" belief:

https://tricycle.org/magazine/we-are-not-one/

Not to mention having biased election volunteers look at your ID and deem it fake or a "different signature." You can take them to court, but by then the election is over, so it doesn't matter. There's so many ways for the Republicans to corrupt the vote and they've had great success in doing so thus far, so why not go deeper down that path? Who is going to stop them? Democrats who even with a majority can't get a caucus going due to there always being conservative democrats who are pretty much republicans and loyal to republican causes.

and more directly, to keep them from voting.

There's many flavors of Buddhism and the idea of all "being one" isn't a shared philosophy amongst them all. The "woo" and connected, anything goes mentality, etc is mostly centered on "California Buddhism," which is a sort of western bastardization of common Buddhist concepts.

If you were to study, say, Theravada, you'd see something a lot more austere, less touch-feely (but compassionate), and very much centered on the four noble truths and eightfold path. It reflects a great deal about suffering, overcoming suffering in a Buddhist fashion, and living very, very morally.

So it helps to name the specific brand of Buddhism you're discussing. You're saying something akin to Christians all believe in transubstantiation and see the Pope as their leader, who can declare himself infallible if he chooses. Yes, Catholics do believe this, but not other Christians. Or speaking in tongues or handling snakes. Or that Jesus was a white northern European man with blue eyes.

Loving relationships

Healthy habits

Emotional growth

Challenging hobbies

Fulfilling romances

Exercise and using your body

Seeing yourself as a whole, not "othering" others

Making time for family

Telling those you love, that you love them

Spiritual practices

Getting lost in a book

Learning to cook

Volunteering and activism

etc,etc

You know, everything that's wonderful about life before capitalism, or at least the most popular implementations of it, told us we don't have time for such things anymore, that both partners need to work 40+ hours a week each, and we've been finding shortcuts to fulfillment and stress relief since. Worse, the status quo has co-opted a lot of good things and turned them into tools for further capitalist oppression. See "learn meditation to be a better employee to help with stress" narratives pushed at so many companies instead of narratives about "why is our work so stressful and what can we do about it?"

I feel like I can't talk to a coder before the conversation turns into "So what drugs are you abusing to remain competitive in the workplace?" We're in such a sea of workplace oppression, its practically water fish swim in, and its often difficult to point and say "Look, the abuses of low-regulatory capitalism is the water here, do you see it?" Instead we just go back to talking about doubling up on ADHD medicine, microdosing exotic chemicals, getting high to 'get by,' low-key drinking problems, caffeine usage thats out of control, etc.

This stuff, if not real, would be unbelievable in a dystopian sci-fi novel just a couple decades ago, but here we are. We're becoming Mentats from Dune addicted to sapho juice to please our paymasters.

Great comment. Way too much of HN is invested in "nanny state bad and corrupt" justified with FUD-like narratives. There's always this low-simmering culture war here. And really, air travel radiation is the hill these types of people want to die on?

The problem with conservative forums like HN is eventually you get on this treadmill of "and so and so isn't so bad" be it alcohol, smoking, Hitler, etc that's a mix of ignorant and purposely dishonest to push agendas. This takes people down some strange and often ignorant and hateful roads, which then helps craft their personalities and core beliefs into something very negative.

The reality is, alcohol is pretty toxic and a health organization really shouldn't recommend a daily allowance of it. I think the cognitive dissonance with people who want to be "right with the science" but also want to drink needs to come out somehow and it often comes out, at least with health issues, with these overly-broad and just weird attacks on groups like the CDC or WHO or whatever. Instead, these people could just admit that "Yes, I do this very unhealthy thing for pleasure and its as unhealthy as the experts say it is." Instead, they'd rather nitpick at random things and reach an irrational conclusion than accept the truth of it all.

On the healthcare end it works the other way like "Here's some unwarranted nitpicking about vaccines," that terminates to a crazed anti-vaxxer position. Its the same kind of dishonesty and leads to the same types of irrational conclusions.

For a lot of people, not only is this how they often think, its the default mode of how they think. They sling mud, project, and attack at any perceived slight against their personal beliefs and the culture war they're always fighting. Its a sign of an emotionally immature mind and these people are everywhere and they build powerful echo chambers. When we see them die of covid as they post facebook memes denying its existence, we then know the fruits of this kind of mental labor. Its dishonestly all the way down.

I find it incredible that people think the government does things like this "just because." It do so because its capitalist masters demand it. Of course this is lobbying driven. The government in a capitalist society exists almost solely to bring the agenda of lobbyists into the legislature by any means possible be it via cash contributions, manufacturing consent via the corporatist media, riling people up via the pulpit, fixing elections, demonizing unrelated minority groups, threatening or even attempting coups, blocking the teaching of certain subjects in school, assassination, etc.

Its incredible to me that there's an entire political identity that borderline denies any of this happens, and instead the government itself is somehow naturally corrupt but business and the lobbying and capital owning class are all angels and saints. Everyday conservatism buys into this fallacy fairly well and this dishonesty seems to be the core of libertarianism.

Explaining this concept to some people feels like how I would imagine explaining water to fish must be. We're just so surrounded by it and it defines so much of our culture, that you can fail to see if you choose. You can just call everything government corruption from cradle to grave without asking about the source and motivation of that corruption. You can swim your whole life and never wonder why you're wet.

The USA is not a totalitarian communist regime. A move leftward for a Democratic capitalist society is modeled on Nordic states, which have the highest outcomes in the world in terms of nearly everything good for humanity. Comparing US liberalism to 1920s communism is highly disingenuous and makes me unable to remotely take your comment seriously.

Japan doesnt have normalized relations with NK. You can't just take a boat there with bags full of yen.

I think what you've heard is probably a reflection of SOUTH Koreans who work in Japan, who are discriminated against by the Japanese, and as such work in places like pachinko parlors because bigotry keeps them out of more reputable and better paying jobs. They do ship money back to family in SK.

Northern Koreans are trapped by their regime and escapees are rare.

The bigotry towards South Koreans in Japan and how so many of them are forced to work in pachinko or other shady businesses is so common there's even a famous novel about it:

https://www.artshelp.net/min-jin-lee-pachinko/

This comment is disaster porn for doomers, preppers, and second comers. Being the 2nd largest manufacturer isn't good enough? Having history's most powerful military isn't good enough? Having $63k gdp per capita during a pandemic year isn't good enough?

>You'll look back on the plague years, and remember them as the calm before the storm.

There's zero evidence this will be true. If anything we'll see this as the dawn of chasing fascism out of the country and a rise of class consciousness for workers and what work life means and how wealth disparity hurts us all. I find the doomers of the world fear exactly this and pray for a collapse than see a leftward swing as millennials and gen-z take power from the doomer-friendly ultra-conservatism so many in the USA accept uncritically.

There's no way to "better handle" leaving your corrupt puppet state to fend for itself after decades of fighting the will of the people who wanted a native Islamic government with their cultural values to rule. Americans universally fail to understand how unpopular we are abroad, how awful our low regulation capitalist values are, and how our military is seen as the murder machine that keeps our world-wide bullying going. There was never political will or loyalty in the puppet government or puppet military we built in Afghanistan. The only question was who was going to hold the bag when we finally had to leave.

The only good way to do this was to never invade and conquer but instead to chase ObL and capture him and fight the Taliban only as needed. How Bush got out of any responsibility for his reckless adventurism, not only here but the unforgivable tragedy of endless war crimes and crimes against humanity his Iraq invasion was, is the real tragedy here not Biden's "execution" somehow being sub-par. Per usual Democrats have to clean up after Republicans.

How could they export money to the regime from within Japan?

VNC outperforms it, which is saying a lot since VNC is terrible. Remote x apps were always this selling point in linux culture and I always thought I was doing something wrong because they were so incredibly slow until I realized its the protocol that's just slow.

The arcades I went to in Akihabara was pretty family friendly, but I did go to a smaller one on the 3rd floor of an anonymous looking business building in a different neighborhood and it was a bit seedy, but it was just nerdy guys playing classic games and classic consoles and not dangerous seeming at all. I wonder if your gf's perceptions are colored by how conformist and competitive Japanese culture is. Of course those men are "losers," they are spending all their time playing children's games. My understanding is that men and women over 25 who aren't married there are seen as "losers" as well, and not being married and being video game obsessed must be a kiss of death in that culture.

As a child of the 80s I'm very familiar with the seedy arcade in the USA. I remember every machine having an ashtray wedged between controller and screen and that awful stink. I doubt the men there were regarded as anything but "losers" by the mainstream of the time as well. Being a capitalist culture, gamers weren't respectable until streaming and tournaments in which they could become wealthy. Money makes right in our culture. So our current perception of gamers is very far from what people thought back then who couldn't get rich playing games.

I wonder how those email addresses worked. Who or what is window@athena? Project Athena is from MIT, so maybe window is a shared account for the group or window is a proto newgroup?

Also its so odd to think that the code couldn't be emailed because of size limitations of the time and you'd have to bring a tape. Weird that he didn't ask for a floppy because floppies were common by then too. Lets remember in 1984 you had the original Mac and a year out from the Amiga so not exactly ancient history and both those devices supported the newer 3.5" disks with 5.25" disks being very common by then. I'm guessing the unix big iron culture of the time was primarily tape based.

Also talk about a missed opportunity. I'd love to see a screenshot of this email on the original x. I'm guessing there was no email client for x back then but it could at least be read in a terminal window. I'm assuming x supported a terminal window this early if it had a working windows manager, but maybe vt100 emulation wasn't in the cards just yet. Still, what a neat piece of computer history. Stuff like this always gives me warm feelings, like in a past life I was somehow active in the culture then and feel nostalgia for it.

That Mac II cost $14,000 in 2021 money. Its just incredible how expensive computers were back then.

This reminds me of all those 80s arcade and Atari/Commodore/Coleco games written almost always by a single person. To think these really iconic experiences were done by someone from start to finish (sounds, graphics, gameplay, idea, execution, debug, etc) as a solo project always seemed a little bizarre to me. Of course those were simpler games but just the creativity plus the know-how is impressive.

I also dont think they had ownership of any of this either. They were paid salary and maybe a small cut of sales. It always seemed like a bad deal considering this was a single creators's project.

Worse, they purposely come from the same email address. So if you want meetup alerts for upcoming meetings, too bad, because now you will get all these marketing materials from the same email, which is now subscribed to various promotional lists. I already told google to put that email straight into my inbox and now I get all that junk too. This is 100% intentional because most people aren't going to click unsub per domain or start writing rules analyzing the ever changing subject line.

You can tell which companies have especially corrupt and greedy corporate cultures by how they treat your email address. Whenever I find myself witnessing behaviors like this I do my best to move off the platform and bad mouth them whenever I can.

Yep this! People would regularly run windows 95 on a 486 with 8-16mb of ram. This was their daily driver which did word, dial up/aol/prodigy, messaging, games, etc. I think the reaction here that someone is able to run a little web server off of it is perhaps a bit overdone. Yes, its impressive he wrote his own stack, but the hardware itself is still beefy.

Bloat also being unionized workers who are incentivized to stay, gain wisdom and skills, and mentor new hires as opposed to the "everyone is fungible, everyone is abusable" worker conditions Elon seems to create.

Also this war on lidar, yet we're seeing these cars crash into trucks and walls, which lidar would have prevented, but lidar costs money, and as such "is bloat." Bloat is anything that keeps Elon and his shareholders from enriching themselves to the maximum degree, and if that means customers have to deal with safety issues, well too bad. The Elon PR machine smooths it over for via marketing efforts and deep ties to corporate media that will sing your song for a price. Life goes on, except for the person killed in the car.

Which is funny because we have so much story telling and myth that suggests the same thing. Our hero lost somewhere follows a wild animal which brings him to food or water or treasure or shelter.

In real life, animals might also be seeking out that 100th triangle. In low density areas like fields they are super exposed to predators and the elements so if chased or watched, they'll go to places with complexity and resources. I think this is a very amusing and interesting parallel between the virtual worlds we build and the real one nature built.

Here's the bug report where players figure out what is happening 2 comments in, if you don't want to watch a 40 minute video (I almost never watch video and find them slow and boring and regret the loss of text in the web)

https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9195