parksy

Hm yeah I think it's an interesting concept, perhaps it's not preferred under current NFT definitions to my mind something can be both non-fungible and mutable. I can own a house, but I can renovate the interior, add rooms, paint walls etc - those changes are done _to_ the house, it's still the same house, and I still own it.

Off-chain solutions where longevity is concerned don't sit well with me - I don't personally trust oracles to be available for eternity or remain benevolent. Your approach based on a smart contract sounds good as it's on-chain. But would it be preferred to have a dynamic / mutable NFT standard with this capability baked in somehow?

Anyway not really my wheelhouse, and as you say probably off topic for now. Just something I find interesting to consider.

Now the seed is planted, one of us is going to talk about JSON Webb Telescopes in a development meeting.

Yeah I was being a little tongue in cheek with the excitement, still it's pretty crazy we're actually seeing and cataloguing exoplanets now which was still in the realms of science fiction less than half a century ago.

Anyway if Stellaris has taught me anything it's that the flares will add additional energy credits to the system... what's not to like?

Great idea, let's sell pixels as NFTs. But how would they control colour? Can the owner of an NFT add to or alter its metadata in anyway?

Bit tongue in cheek really. People are already slamming NFTs as useless scams, the media would have a field day over this lol.

Sweet let's crank up the generation ships. Of course picking a suitably inspiring name should be the first priority. Unity? Terra Nova? Gaia?

On a more serious note is this a good candidate for JWST, would it be able to infer chemical composition from the planet's spectrum or something?

Awesome though we went from (in my lifetime) learning at school that other planets have never been observed, to finding them sprinkled around basically every star just like our own. I feel like it won't be long before we detect the first potential chemical markers of alien life, if it's out there. Keep doing your thing space science folk!

I think I can relate. I'm a pragmatist (I think anyway), and it was tough to "get" the point of FP just from reading about it, and sometimes I think the proponents can unwittingly make it sound more complicated and wondrous and less accessible since from an outside perspective the terminology seems like a pile of academic buzzwords (it's not, just how anything specialised can look from the outside).

It took a while of actually using some FP patterns for a couple of things to sink in. First, that I'd already been using these patterns in an ad-hoc way, I just didn't have the terminology for it, and second was realising just how repetitive these patterns were in my work. A lot of the code I wrote would either iterate over collections to do stuff to the contents / build a modified collection (map), or iterate a collection and determine something about the contents, like does the user have product x in their cart, or something (reduce).

These days I find code more readable when it uses mapping / reduction and other FP patterns, it's not so much that there's less boilerplate (maybe a couple of lines, nothing drastic), but the grammar itself expresses meaning, I don't have to trace through an entire nested loop section to understand the developer's intentions from the outset.

For instance if I see map, I understand they must be producing a collection based on the input. If they're using reduce, they're figuring out some property of the entire collection.

Also (this is a big plus), the developer would have to go out of their way to modify the original collection, which is always a fun source of unexpected functionality when reading through traditional loops; map and reduce avoid this by design as modified collections are produced as output and don't surreptitiously modify the input. Basically by design you end up with fewer mega-loops that cram in updates, computation, and modify the source data in sneaky ways.

Without reading the contents of the mapping and reduction functions, the grammar of this is very clear to me: "newCollection = (collection.reduce({criteria})) ? collection.map({abc}) : collection.map({def})" - I can see that I'm checking the collection for some criteria, then mapping the collection based on one of two criteria. The grammar itself tells me exactly what's going on before I even have to read the contents of the mapping and reducer functions. Sure that can also be accomplished with a couple of loops, but then I'd have to read through the loops to understand exactly what the broader intention is.

Anyway as I said I consider myself a pragmatist rather than an evangelist for any particular methodology. I don't consider myself a FP programmer but I've found some of the concepts useful tools to have around. Like anyone on a wage, time is money and I use whatever gets the result the client wants in the best way from time, budget, and maintainability perspective. But I hope at least the concept seems a bit less pointless / like code golf with the above context?

If it's general enough and durable enough (like not having to replace a chip / filter every time it's used), I don't think it's hyperbole to think of the possible applications more broadly.

Would be a step toward the ol' Star-Trek tricorder. They say it can detect various organic molecules. I wonder if it has potential for non-invasive blood testing, e.g. blood glucose. If it is general purpose, could it indicate other potential health conditions? More broadly could you scan your drink at the bar for illicit substances? Would it detect noxious gasses in your vicinity?

Definitely feels like a decent step in that direction.

The repo doesn't contain the actual distro itself, it appears to be loading CheerPX's virtualisation engine and feeding it a disk image here https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm/blob/6efab7e60bf6f173a2...

Assuming they wrote their own xterm interface (no idea if they did, I got as far as that), seems everything open-source is fetched by the client at runtime. This feels to me more like a bootloader than an OS. Not sure where that lands it license-wise whether merely linking to the image requires appropriate licensing and attribution but either way the work seems pretty straightforward to replicate assuming you have / can supply an xterminal-esque interface and can compile your OS image appropriately.

I don't think they're doing anything wrong licensing-wise but I guess it depends on how the law defines including software as a library, whether that needs to happen at compile time or run time, or whatever. Seems like a grey area?

There's a huge swing against literally anything crypto-related at the moment. I feel a big part of it is that big gaming companies pricked their ears up on the idea of NFTs and being able to own a marketplace sipping the cream from billions of microtransactions in realtime. Serious gamers really, really don't like that idea, having already been screwed down by DLC's, Pre-ordering, buggy and unfinished games, "seasons", "surprise mechanics" (literally gambling for virtual items).

The general consensus has spun around to being that anything crypto is a scam, elaborate ponzi/pyramid scheme, etc, etc. Bored Apes is a bit silly, NFTs could technically be used for so much more but that would require the right platform, and legislative support (ie the backing of society) to have meaning.

I think the cat is out of the bag tech-wise. I think you're right that improvements will be made - blockchain / distributed ledger / whatever you want simply exists now, and I doubt it will ever stop existing. Ignoring the tidal wave of criticism it faces now, some valid, some not, it has inherent technological advantages in cases where trustless, distributed, peer to peer transactional events need to be rigidly catalogued and visible to all participants.

I also think most of these positive advancements that will change the fabric of society yada yada, will require the profit motive to be eliminated completely, where maintaining a blockchain becomes something done for ethical or moral reasons like folding@home rather than hoping to ride the next whale's massive pump. It's kinda sad how desparate we all are for riches, billions of us but the financial incentive is the best motivator we could come up with.

But I digress. Prepare to be shouted down over the next few months / years for saying anything positive about any blockchainish-tech, it's all pretty well tarred with the same brush as NFTs and dodgey doge market manipulation at this point. It'll calm down eventually. It is what it is. Probably a well deserved critique of a concept that is still at a point equivalent to computers in the 80s vs smartphones today.

Give it time. People will find a proper use for it.

No because hacking generally circumvents the intended system design. The architecture of the World Wide Web explicitly allows for user discretion in fetching and executing linked content. There's no slippery slope from using a system within design parameters and executing malicious instructions on other people's systems without their permission and/or knowledge.

Can concur though I played both Solar Winds and SC2 back in the day. Even at the time Solar Winds felt like a cheaper cash-in on the space RPG genre. The ship drove like a car, the ship modifications were pretty limited. Though it had a great power management system which could have formed the basis for some pretty inventive gameplay if it was properly leveraged.

I've come back to Solar Winds maybe once in the past 20 years, and replayed SC2 about 4 or 5 times since UQM was released.

Was looking forward to the next instalment but the quagmire of legal issues, divided fanbase, etc, has really left a sour impression on the future of the franchise for me, which is sad given the world TFB created initially.

Contracting is not easy but it can pay more. I find finding clients the easy part but all the surrounding stuff is nuanced and complicated (as soon as you start contracting you are literally essentially running your own business).

Before jumping ship (if you decide to), pay close attention to the no-compete clauses etc in your current employment contract.

It's pretty easy to get contracting gigs for technical work - development, solution architecture, etc. A lot of companies are super happy to outsource risk. It generally costs more to place a human at a physical desk in an office than outsource to a contractor who brings their own devices and pays their own taxes and has their own public liability insurance. As long as you can show someone a portfolio of work that impresses them, and takes the problem off their desk, you'll find work.

There is no magic to networking. A lot of the finding work process just boils down to hanging out with the right people at the right time. Go to industry events. Cook BBQ's for coworkers. Remember the birthdays of coworkers' past and present. Put yourself in front of people who might need you in the future and make sure they remember you fondly. This is a decades-long process.

Pricing-wise just find your average local wage, add taxes and benefits, and that's your centre point to aim for. Bump it up a bit if you are actually a high achiever.

Honestly whether it's better to be contracted or employed, I think it's a personal preference. I can't stand the corporate buy-in that comes from being an employee, and value my independence. It burns me greatly at times when I find myself broke and scrambling to find a gig, so if it's assurance you're after then full time employment really is a good thing, but for me being able to jot down that I won't agree to my IP being owned by the company that's hiring me today is a pretty powerful incentive not to become a standard employee.

I feel like you just wanted to go on the attack for the examples I gave, I can definitely see where you're coming from. My point was that you can pick a tech, extrapolate a few decades, and you'll probably get a few wins. You wanted to attack my example of banks, notaries, parliamentary records etc becoming obsolete, since it's "not exciting". Sadly these boring things are the bedrock of civilisation, so exciting or not, if they become obsolete, then the technological and social fabric of society is impacted in some way or another. The boring changes are sometimes the most meaningful long-term.

What stands out to me is the prescience in the speed and penetration of technological advancements juxtaposed with an apparent blind spot for the advancements in social change. Even the most dire or utopian science fiction of the early to mid 20th century seems to reasonably accurately predict technological changes but somehow expects that future social structures will somehow fall into place or adapt to the technology. They imagine these wild technological advancements and bludgeon them into their current-day social mores.

Thinking about today, where the topic of the day is distributed trustless computing and so on, it's easy to imagine now the cat's out of the bag that in 100 years, old institutions like banks, notaries, record-keeping (Hansards etc) could be obsolete, knowledge becomes distributed and every human commands one or more nodes in a constant system of cross-referencing - clients and servers cease to be relevant as a concept, information is just a pool you dip into as needed (with helpful AI assistants to bring things to your attention and/or demand your attention). It could be so pervasive it wouldn't garner a second's thought in the mind of a 2122 individual. Information is just there, always, forever, and always cross-checked for correctness. Duh. (not saying this is even an ideal future, or likely, but it's a trend that's easily extrapolated)

But if that did come to pass, how does that change the fabric of society in 2122? Does the relationship between society and the products it demands and produces change significantly? Does the status-quo stay more or less the same between the workers and the organisers? Do we find a way to deal with cultural differences globally or adopt the "metaverse" and slowly fragment into virtual islands of relative ideological same-ness? These are much harder things to predict, just how in 1922 the idea of not having servants at home to do the bidding of the family matriarch seemed so far-fetched that even an imagined hundred years of progress couldn't fully erase the notion; what concepts do we see as being so firmly entrenched in our culture(s) today that no upheaval of technology could convince us they'd also be on the way out, if not obsolete, in 100 years.

I love seeing these old predictions as much for what they got right as for what they missed. I showed my 12 year old daughter this article and we had a light-hearted conversation about it but she said something that struck me; "society probably won't even be here in 100 years" - I hope that isn't true, it's not something I've directly taught her to believe, but we're surrounded on all fronts by media filled with dire predictions of humanity's collapse and self-destruction on a daily basis, so I'm going to have to work to instil some hope. I am heartened slightly as historically it seems we're really bad at predicting how society as a whole will change long-term, so I do hope we're wrong on the old boiled frogs / status-quo inertia analogies, and that our species makes some giant leaps in terms of collective environmental and social responsibility in the next 100 years.

Nothing really profound I know just a dad pondering his kids futures, fingers crossed we figure some things out.

This is awesome, the engineering and execution is simply inspiring.

In the past several years I have done 12km charity runs & daily gym workouts, pushing myself mentally the whole time. When younger I was doing surf lifesaving, weightlifting, played soccer for nearly 15 years. I'm the social organiser for my group, regularly putting on BBQ's and arranging to meet up.

All of this takes a supreme level of effort, it never felt natural to me. Never got a "jogger's high". I was just depressed while my feet are moving. After spending time with friends I am emotionally drained and need to recharge. When I have a serious bout of depression, it's difficult to leave the bedroom / house for days or weeks at a time (at its worst). My entire body feels like I've been tumbled down a hill in a barrel.

In this time I've had a half dozen suicide attempts, two of them requiring medical attention. I still think of myself as a worthless waste of space. Every day when I wake up part of my routine is to shake off the suicidal ideation just to get started for the day.

CBT has helped to deal with the logical / behavioural impacts of this. I don't get as mad or frustrated at myself and am better equipped to recognise triggers and pull myself back from the edge.

I think if I had been able to get help when I was a child (I first started self-harming at age 7), perhaps being happy and motivated would feel more natural.

But no, even forcing a lifestyle change and doing all the things you said have no lasting effect. I doubt it will ever feel natural for me to wake up, go for a run, meet a friend before work for coffee, enjoy meetings with clients, etc.

Definitely still do those activities, otherwise things snowball. But the problem is a literal chemical / hormone imbalance in my brain that affects everything from when, how often and how long I sleep, and how much lethargy I have throughout the day.

A lot of people struggling with depression have had a lifetime of advice similar to what you suggested. Well-meaning family think it's as simple as just getting moving, and they think the symptoms are the problem, and we have a lifetime of being told to stop being lazy, stop feeling sorry for ourselves, etc, which is the main "stigma" of depression and the reason why these types of well-meaning posts usually result in less than positive responses from long-term chronic depression sufferers.

Edit to add - everyone's root causes are not the same, so while I have decent stretches where I can push myself to exercise and face the day, other people can't and there are times where I can't summon the energy and it's difficult to move. Also inb4 try changing your diet, have you tried meditation, read this <insert famous author>, etc. Living like this sucks and I've read and tried many things to ease the pain. Improvements are slow, incremental, hard-won, and often temporary / good until the next downer hits.

If I read the post correctly, is the poster saying that the big issue is the Apache HTTP webserver is vulnerable? As far as I understand it, Apache webserver is written in C, while log4j is a Java library / framework, so I don't see how the two are related.

Still a pretty big deal with a lot of java-based web services (including some other Apache software) open to the web in various forms (which possibly use log4j) but the specific HTTP webserver itself I think is unaffected, or is my understanding off here?

(edit to add - probably means though that there's now tons of curious developers scouring the logging layer of their favourite software to see if similar exploits exist).

When I was working as a web developer for a company, I published a game I spent many years dreaming of, and in real terms thousands of hours learning and creating. I wrote the music, drew the sprites, coded the game loops, purchased all the tools, built it using my own hardware etc. The CFO at some party or other after a few beers told me if the game actually became successful, there was nothing I could do to stop them claiming ownership of all of the IP because of a clause I'd signed at some point.

Since I left that place and I believe most of my time-limited terms have expired, IP is one of the very few things I'll get caught up on with a contract. I'm flexible around hours, reporting, attire, presence, etc, but IP outside of specifically client-related work activities is where I draw the line.

I am a digital creator on my own time, I always have been since I was a child, I draw inspiration from many sources, whether it's work or books or videos or art, or even just a random thought. The notion that one day one of these things randomly becomes successful and a bevy of previous clients lays claim to the fruits of my labour sickens me to the core and goes against every sense of living in a fair and just society.

I've knocked back clients who refuse to budge on this issue. I'm no Bill Gates or whatever, but there's absolutely no way I'm signing over rights to things I invent or innovate on my own time. If the people I work for want access to that additional service beyond whatever monkey-shit I'm doing for them then they can pay for it and not just swipe it through some boilerplate IP clauses.

Clickbait is a common complaint and not without merit. I wonder how difficult / useful it would be to integrate something like smmry.com, so we can get a 1-sentence summary (this is the same tool reddit's "autotldr" bot uses).

It generated the following single sentence summary of the article, which I think combined with the title at least in this instance adds valuable context as to whether the rest of the article is worth clicking through to read:

"The resulting map of brain activity was so pronounced and consistent between the eight worms used in the study that they could use it to predict the behaviors of a ninth worm, explained Vladislav Susoy, a neuroscientist and first author of the study."

https://smmry.com/https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-brain-m...

edit: sorry for being meta / off topic, just a random thought.

Me, my problem has always been eagerness to please, so I'd agree to "just do it" and skip the first part.

Don't, under any circumstances, do that.

If the client asks for a fixed price, then don't propose an implementation cost. Instead, propose a discovery cost. I can easily say how long I'll need to figure out what needs to be done and deliver a documented solution with an estimate of the work needed.

If they refuse this approach, then the only other option is "time and materials", i.e. I will send you a log each week of the hours I've worked and the product I've delivered, and you will pay me each week.

If they refuse discovery as well as time and materials, and insist on fixed price, then I walk away.

Pretty much this. It was a stupid mistake and it cost me dearly. My choices were to suffer and work for a few dollars a day, or suffer even more and be blacklisted in my local community, if not being dragged through the unknown depths of some legal dispute that I had no recourse to fight. And to be fair, I agreed to do it, so it was kind of on me for not doing my homework. We live and learn to protect ourselves, but when there's a glut of people who haven't learned yet it's very lucrative for people who will exploit ignorance deliberately.

A small anecdote (side note- I seem to be turning into the old guy yells at cloud meme), though I'm a tech guy at heart it had been many years since I'd needed to know anything about USB's tech capabilities. Just over 15 years ago I was bit-banging over USB with an AVR device to retrofit some legacy DB-25 hardware / software into Windows / USB. So I figured I learned enough about USB to last a lifetime. Boy oh boy.

Since then though I got lazy, fell behind in my knowledge, and was comfortable just being able to plug stuff in to charge / transfer data / whatever. It seemed like a solved problem so I went about my work without considering the ins and outs of a simple cable. I mean, it's just USB right? Different connectors, some carry more current, faster speeds over time etc, what more to know?

Then mainly during early Covid when I was often switching between working from home vs in offices, I got sick of how many cables I needed to plug and unplug each morning and when I got home.

I was inspired to solve this problem after one office I worked at had a USB-C dock that magically supported 2 displays, ethernet, etc. So I thought brilliant! I'd get one of those...

Only they don't seem to exist / be in stock anywhere anymore, at least not without a long shipping delay from overseas. So after talking with a sales assistant at the local office supplies warehouse I grabbed something similar (and expensive for what essentially amounts to a fancy USB hub) off the shelf that had video support, and was saddened when it didn't work. That's when I read the instructions that were packaged with the device and apparently it only supported the USB-C with the little lightning bolt icon. Cue hours of reading and research to get up to speed on what all the different little icons I'd never noticed in the injection-moulded plastic meant.

Okay my bad, I should have spent more time keeping up with technology and less time watching netflix.

At least the dock worked for everything else, it wasn't ideal but I could deal with just 2 cables to swap out.

But why then did the dock at the office work?

I grabbed the model number and did some more research and lo and behold it has a built-in graphics adapter. So rather than outputting frames from my still quite capable GTX1070, some cruddy generic display chip was doing all the work through USB and some proprietary display drivers. I tried a couple of games as a benchmark and yep, FPS was woeful. That wouldn't do for my home office at all, so I nixed any hope of getting true video out via USB-C from this device.

All told it was probably less than a day of actual time spent, and a hundred dollars so no big deal for me. But this experience led me to seriously consider that if someone like me with a strong interest and experience in tech gets sent for a spin by something that should be simple and "universal", I don't really understand how the average consumer is supposed to navigate it all. Sure, it's simple once you know, but it is niche knowledge, most people want to learn things about people, their jobs, stuff directly relevant to them and not memorize a grid of cable standards. So I'd wager most people don't read too deeply into it and either a cable/device "works" or is "broken / shit."

Thinking of all the time wasted and frustration people must have swapping devices and cables, the sense that finding a magical combo that works creates a cargo-cult type mindset around brands and devices, as if it's all witchcraft voodoo. I wonder how many perfectly good cables and devices get returned or trashed each day because people think they're "broken."

Anyway old guy has finished yelling at cloud for the day.

Like I say, I made the mistake in signing the contract. In my case there was no "15 days late", it was payment on completion, and to the letter of the agreement the work wasn't complete until they said it was. Definitely do things different these days.

Edit to add - as per your experience the team themselves were pretty good to work with but in my case they had no sway (or at least said they didn't) with whatever archaic nested babushka-esque financial and legal mechanisms this century-old institute had. Perhaps if I'd put my foot down and refused to work it would have forced a proper renegotiation and worked out better in the end but it was a constant state of "we'll be finished next week, just one more thing" so the old sunk cost fallacy was always in deadlock with pragmatism and the frog slowly boiled.

I felt the pain of losing a steady income stream before but for a different reason. I have no problem networking per-se but I did once rather blithely sign a really onerous contract with a massive soul-less organisation that buried me unpaid for about 9 months essentially reworking their entire CRM. Renegotiation was impossible, they'd just point at their massive legal department and I'd squeak and get back to work.

When it was all done and dusted, every ounce of my energy had been poured into this one job for so long, the payment was like a middle finger and barely filled the hole of bad debt that had grown to cover basic living expenses, and it took a couple more months to reconnect with old clients and drum up some new work as I'd essentially fallen off the face of the planet in their eyes. It also took months to recover emotionally and start to feel some joy in life again.

It was a painful, very real education, whereas as an employee you're shielded to an extent from the direct effects of this type of thing since your employer is still legally bound to pay you whether they make good or bad decisions client-wise.

The risks in contracting and self employment are often subtle and not realised for many months until the trap is seen, and I doubt everyone making the transition is aware of all the tricks (net 30 EOM) etc that seem innocuous at first glance but in combination really screw contractors down to terms much less comfortable than sitting in a cubicle 8hrs/day dealing with latent passive aggression from middle management. In the current system at least we just have to weigh up which option suits us better. I was certainly unprepared, but I survived and am stronger / more experienced now with only slight residues of latent psychological damage (mostly self-inflicted).

tl;dr I agree. It's not all roses. Very simple mistakes based on subtle information can have very real, very painful consequences long term and a lot of this knowledge is only gained through hard-won experience. With more inexperienced contractors entering the market it seems like a field day for unscrupulous types looking to lock in some cheap labour without the annoying hassle of traditional employment laws but that's just my hot take. I'd encourage people to think very carefully before making any transition one way or the other that's for sure.

What bugs me is so much of our (Australia's) government's policies over time have increasingly deferred to some ISO standard or another. These days most agencies / departments are stipulating some form of ISO27k compliance from vendors, a standard that can only be purchased from ISO.

Given we pay our taxes to the government, and I would have thought defining policy standards was one of the services we pay tax to have (what better thing for governments to do than what they're naturally geared towards - bureaucracy?), at the very least they would be able to directly and in detail outline the standards they expect and not simply handball the entire definition and auditing off to an international organisation and myriad consultancies with the stroke of a single bullet point requirement in the RFx.

The quagmire of ISO consultancies are often charging exorbitant rates to deliver essentially a set of Excel templates, when the hard work of adopting a standard really is all in-house and any company with a copy of the standards and the templates can pretty much get it all done internally then get certified.

And ultimately when it comes down to it, the standard doesn't really do much to improve quality outcomes, especially for an organisation that doesn't give a fig. A well intentioned company that's on the ball will already be following best practices, a shady company that plays cowboy will do the bare minimum to get the badge.

Anyway, just an axe I tend to grind. Standards definitely are needed and have their place but holy hell is it a mess ATM. There needs to be an independent open source standards body, ISO is a farce IMHO - the standards as they are written are actually decent but their business model and hands-off approach to auditing and verifying standard adherence is a big issue across multiple sectors I think.

I think what these stories reveal is just how much people underestimate how common domestic abuse is and it doesn't appear to discriminate based on status, fame, career choice, etc.

As far as building healthier communities and what we can learn, I think it's definitely healthy to maintain and continue to improve the focus on helping victims and prevent potential victims from becoming a target of abuse. Everyone should be able to be part of a safe community without fear of harm.

I think there's another dimension that is significantly less popular, which is about enabling people who may have abusive tendencies to get the help they need. Society generally wants to dismiss and discard these people but that just pushes the problem into the shadows, as it's social suicide basically to come forward and say "I need help, I can't control my behaviour / keep hurting people / etc." Especially if you have any degree of publicity around your life and career.

Cancel culture was like a spark that started a fire that shone a light into these dark spaces, and some people are trash that need to be called out and exposed, especially people who get their rocks off on abuse, but there's shades of grey in between "victim" and "abuser" that don't fit the conventional good guy vs bad guy stereotypes, and it's in that realm I think there's a lot of progress yet to be made in identifying, preventing, and responding to abusive behaviours as a society.

I don't really have solutions but it's a multifaceted issue that needs solutions from all angles.

The way I did it was I was writing music and doing pixel art since the 90's and learning to write games on the side. One day I decided to take all the assets I'd built up over 30 years and condense them into the simplest game I could complete on the side and that's how I made Space Strafer. I think if I had to start from scratch with all the music, art, and concepts it would have been impossible, what with having kids and all.

I was doing BASIC on an Amstrad CPC at 5. Sure it was just simple GOTO 10 stuff (print hello, border 10, print alex, border 5, goto 10 etc...), but I also knew how to run games (how else would I play harrier attack?).

My mum in particular was very attentive to teaching me reading and writing and I did cursive from a young age, I got in trouble at age 7 because I wasn't doing the curriculum-endorsed print in class (the teacher picked me up by the hair and shook me), but yeah I was definitely doing basic computer stuff by 5 and definitely knew how to pick up a pencil.

I always say I started programming at 10 because it sounds more believable and that's when I was making simple text adventure games but yeah. Welcome to the mid 80s where having a CLI was the only way to compute at home, where parenting was a great deal more laissez flair but also more punitive (the whole debate about "smacking" was still in the future then).

Possibly, but not in Australia. Among other things our government has a secret blacklist it forces ISPs to implement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral...

The usual reasons are given - protecting children and preventing other illegal activity, which is all well and good and commendable in theory. However there have been instances where the filter has been used to silence opposing political opinions, as well as prevent access to materials on subjective moral grounds (ie "hardcore" pornography, online gambling, discussion of suicides, etc) where the government has decided Aussies shouldn't do that sort of thing, which seems a bit puritanical and mildly thought police-y.

It's not like we're in an "actual dictatorship", by and large the representative democracy trundles along as best these things do, and the life and freedoms we enjoy in Australia make us incredibly privileged compared to much of the world. But this whole online censorship and thought policing our government seems fond of is something I disagree with. In addition to banning certain forms of speech and text, they're now pushing through an act that sets the stage for de-anonymising all users online with a government-issued "Digital ID", the next step presumably being making it illegal to provide and use anonymous web services in Australia. That has broad implications for things like Reporters Without Borders, corporate and government whistleblowers, etc.

Coupled with a historical record of every blocked or "suspect" DNS attempt, and these trends paint a dire picture for individuals who may have legitimate interests or even just curiosity about something like "how are drugs made." Handing this information to the federal government seems risky to me because I don't know what they're going to decide to make illegal to read and write about in the future. Our government has talked seriously about banning encryption many times over the years, and are currently at war against social media, so who knows what they'll do.

That doesn't mean I agree that people should get away with heinous acts or organised crime, but it's why I personally avoid using my ISP's DNS resolution in Australia. I don't exactly trust Google either, but I'd rather they deal with my DNS lookup than our technophobe government.

Sorry for the long rant, probably could have just left it at my first sentence, but it all touches on the one subject in Australian politics that really rubs me the wrong way, and most people I talk to here are of the mind "if you're not doing something wrong, there's nothing to worry about." Just, gah!

Another impact could be increased cotton farming in Brazil upstream which appears to have doubled over the past 20 years.

Similar issues are occurring with floodplain harvesting in Australia where cotton farms are damming rivers which has dried up river beds downstream.

https://cottonbrazil.com/brazilian-cotton/