fipar

I think it's similar with the original post. Regardless of how I feel about present-day computing, I think comparing it with war devices designed to maim and kill people, and that can (and do) keep maiming and killing people long after a war is over isn't going to be very effective.

This was one of the 2 (!) games I had as original at that time(the other being Sub Battle Simulator), and it had a beautiful map and book. The book would include some details that were asked before the first fencing fight, like "When did ship X leave port Y?" and if you got the answer wrong, as best as I could try (and I did intentionally try to beat that part after giving the wrong answer) you'd always lose it and not be able to start your career.

The short answer would be that mainframes come with RBAC from design, unlike Unix, which has a different security model from conception and then had rbac added on top of it in some cases (such as selinux).

I’ll agree that Linux security is quite limited and primitive if compared with, say, a mainframe, but it can be made less bad with a reasonable amount of effort.

Every day around noon she’d come out of her leave and wait to catch an insect. It was amazing to see her precisely jump to get it, and watching her eat was a mix of gross and interesting. I normally dislike spiders (though I don’t kill them unless I really feel threatened) but jumping spiders are an exception and I’d actually describe them as nice, almost pet/friend material.

While I agree with you about Ono’s art, I disagree on this. I know art is subjective, but in my times at MoMA I’ve found it bimodal: works on display there either blow ls my mind or I just don’t feel anything about.

I mean obviously the age boundaries may change a bit but otherwise he's spot on. Also, I'd say it's not just technology as I've seen a similar attitude towards other things (e.g, how a dress code is not that common any more, or how you can walk up to a store or even go to a hospital and be greeted by someone with tattoos and green hair "is against the natural order of things").

And to stress again that I'm not being derogatory, I've got close people who have those reactions and I love them even if I disagree with them.

But for people not in that "normal" group my experience is nothing like that. I've seen: - People being amazed at how exciting something that existed when they were born is, to the point of building emulators and even physical replicas of it. - People way after 35 who go deep in on very new things that drastically change the way they work (the example I'm thinking of here is the old musicians I know who've embraced modelers and DAWs, things that only got good enough to be used by professionals in, what, the last 20 years? - In that same line though, I know young kids who use portastudios and hate DAWs. Some release cassettes too. One has to guess their target audience never wasted life untangling tape and rewinding with a ball pen ...

Still, I think your last line is most likely spot on as far as the author goes. Probably going through some mid-life crisis (lest this come across as ageist, I'm way past half my country's life expectancy).

Also, "Every pub conversation winding up talking about it."

That's just the author going to the wrong pubs! Like the Jonathan Richman song says:

"Well the first bar things were alright But in this bar, things were Friday night."

This is so true to me but I never thought of putting it to words like that. I love music and darkness so much that during some especially intense moments in live shows I've been to I close my eyes instead of looking at the band.

I share your pessimism partially, but I also wonder: if the system keeps optimizing for profit, at some point there just won't be enough people in the world to sell products and services to. I don't know what the answer is.

Edit: typo

It takes me back to my school years. I never got as far as you (not by any long stretch actually), but I did enjoy creating the storage layer of a database from scratch. To actually have to deal with, instead of just think of, all the edge cases, is quite the transformative experience.

As a humble suggestion, since it seems your goal is to understand how relational databases work and not necessarily to write a new database that will compete with others, maybe don't make it an SQL one? We've got enough of those, and not enough of the others. Would be nice to have a new relational DB using Tutorial D as its language for example.

Keep hacking!

While mine did certainly scream when they were hungry (or annoyed, or bored, or I picked the wrong red crayon, etc.), they also had non-screaming verbal communication.

Both my kids started "talking" very early (I wanna say within the first or, at most, second month of being born, but "and we'll remember this when we are old and ancient though the specifics might be vague". In any case, definitely while babies), it's just that we (obviously?) didn't understand them. But they had a very definite "language" of different sounds, which was also different between them if we compare it.

Screaming is a good way for babies to get attention, but it's certainly not the only one!

This is beautifully illustrated by this line from Leonard Cohen's "Everybody knows":

"Everybody got this broken feeling Like their father or their dog just died"

As someone who has lost both a parent and a dog, I can relate completely to this.

Some parts of some religions encourage followers to be kind to some others. Some parts encourage them to discriminate, assimilate, or even kill (also some) others.

While I’m an atheist, I don’t buy the narrative that religion is the root of all evil, and I recognize that there are several good outcomes of some religions (e.g., help people come out of addiction), but if you think religions are all about kindness, I think you may just not have been looking around enough.

I was on the phone so couldn't type much, but my point is the concept of the collective cognitive imperative (much better explained in the book than in Wikipedia, to be fair) would answer your question by saying "it's not that nobody thinks that: it's that enough people accept those insane things to the point that 1) they don't think they're insane things, 2) you'd be an outsider (or even considered insane) if you point out the fact that they're insane things.

I'll try to give an example that would work in my cultural context (South America): someone making a rain dance during a drought would be considered by most to be something from harmlessly silly to crazy. Someone praying to the christian god for guidance or help would be seen as normal.

“ Such ridicule typically will not occur after a religious conversion brings a previous non-conformist into the fold of the culture’s dominant religion.”

My daughter is 18. She first listened to The Great Gig in The Sky on some joke/funny video involving Mario (I mean one of the Super Mario Bros). She looked what the song was, started listening to the album, and is now a huge Pink Floyd fan.

As for DSOTM, she has it on CD and Vinyl, though she mostly listens to their music on Deezer.

Learned to play the bass riff to Money too, so it seems some people still enjoy the full album listening experience and also digging deep (freak-territory deep) into the ones they really like.

I should add that neither my wife nor I (we both have mostly distinct taste in music, though with some overlap) forced anything on her or her brother (who is 10 and a big RHCP fan, in particular of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and professes to hate Pink Floyd, though I don’t know how much of that is just to annoy his sister), and while my wife is more of a song listener (and on streaming, a playlist listener, with she creating the lists) I’m an album listener myself. Even when I got to CDs (from tape, we couldn’t afford a turntable when I was young so I got to vinyl after I got my grandma’s collection) I rarely skipped a track unless I really felt it as filler.

The first paragraph I find under Key Features is:

Distributed Transactions: TiDB uses a two-phase commit protocol to ensure ACID compliance, providing strong consistency. Transactions span multiple nodes, and TiDB's distributed nature ensures data correctness even in the presence of network partitions or node failures.

It claims to ensure correctness in the presence of partitions, not availability, so I don't think that's a claim that CAP is wrong? I would expect it to be unavailable if it can't provide a consistent response.

I don't know about memory management. It seems go may not be used for the storage layer, but in any case, it wouldn't be the first attempt at a DB on a garbage collected runtime. I can think of at least Cassandra on the jvm and CockroachDB also on Go. I do prefer that DBs do their own memory management (as well as storage) but this is not as unique as it used to be though.

I guess, unsurprisingly, for jargon it is as for almost anything else: there’s a utility function with one inflection point past which the output value actually becomes less (if the goal is to convey information as clearly as possible, for other goals, I guess the utility function may be exponential …)

We’re a long way from that, if we ever get there, and I say this as someone who pays for ChatGPT plus because, in some scenarios, it does indeed make me more productive, but I don’t see your future anywhere near.

And if machines ever get good enough to do all the things I mentioned plus the ones I didn’t but would fit in the same list, it’s not the ultra rich that wouldn’t need us, it’s the machines that wouldn’t need any of us, including the ultra rich.

Venezuela is not collapsing because of automation.

If air travel rationing would ever be implemented, instead of travel becoming a rich person's hobby (which it already is, for a very loose definition of rich, a definition loose enough that it also counts people with in-house bathrooms with running water and waste disposal systems as rich) it would become a powerful person's hobby.

Not that different IMHO.

But, just to be clear, I'm totally with you. It's just that I'm terribly pessimistic.

What kind of gives me little moments of joy is thinking of what the 3000 version of "Fall of civilizations" podcast will have to say about what is happening now.

I'm glad when an authoritarian regime does something that ends up being good but 1) I still dislike the regime, and 2) I don't think that's something you can rely on.

Plus I'm pretty sure (just like everyone else) they're doing this not to avoid climate change but because they have a huge opportunity coming out ahead as providers of cleaner means of transportation (IMHO they already kick ass in EVs and will be the dominant player in this market).

But your point stands and has a lot of merit. What remains of my point is that I suspect most people in China wouldn't care about CO2 if up to them, and most of the rest of the poor/undeveloped countries will continue to not care.

I just don't think this is an easy thing to resolve.

So basically, it’s the same way it has always been, since we’re in the climate change situation because of rich countries, and I don’t think a lot of us in poor countries care to stop producing CO2, it’s our turn now.

“Everything is gonna burn, we’ll all take turns, I’ll get mine too”

I’m 46 and my oldest is 18 and will start college next year (southern hemisphere), not that different from you after adjusting for our age difference :)

I used to have very frequent pain episodes that would severely affect my ability to type on a keyboard, and now they are almost completely gone (and when I do get them, it's nowhere near as severe as it used to be).

That said, I still have a Model 100 (as the one depicted in the older pictures in the post) and the ergonomics are IMHO worth it, at least compared to some of the keyboards available, but in particular to builtin laptop keyboards (as you mention, everything is bad about laptops and I treat mine like a very portable desktop: if I need to be on the move, I take my keyboard and trackpad and use the laptop as a small display).

On top of that, the fact that it's programmable turned out to be much better than I had thought. My workflow is heavily customized now and I'm objectively a lot faster than I used to be before. The layers system on this keyboard takes a bit of getting used to (as does the layout itself) but, at least for me, once I got through the learning curve, it's so good I'm going to buy another one to have as a spare.