rtourn

I think Altered Carbon brought up the most chilling view of a world without death. In that exploration only the rich are immortal, because the poor can’t afford immortality. Someone being rich for hundreds of years will only cement their their power, position, and their perspective. How do we feel if Rockefeller were still alive and powerful? What if our old kings never died? If any of them had a sexual perversion, what if it continued for hundreds of years? Where does that road lead?

I expected this to be some dude’s project that got blown out of proportion.

With much of the world we interact with being digital, or at least digitally connected, the ability to interact with that world is like unlocking a magical power.

Invoke regex to search through or fix thousands of pages of documents. Instantiate a daemon to help you around the house. Cast a bot army to do your bidding. Prove an idea true or false by creating a simulation of it. Create the app that no one would ever make because only you in particular need it.

Same. It’s weird that my misunderstanding of someone’s idea often better than the idea they were actually proposing.

A good text editor will have regex ability, and once you learn it, it’s super convenient to have it handy. Writing macros to do stuff is more of a hassle. RegEx is most useful for me as a super quick and easy way to solve a one off problem that isn’t important enough to write code to solve.

I once walked in on a coworker (who’s not a developer) who had copied a pdf into text and was laboriously scrolling through thousands of lines of text to remove footer text with page numbers. He spent hours doing this, it’s a 10 second problem with using regex.

In the same job, sometimes our clients would give me large files in the wrong format (like a word document) that couldn’t be normally be import. Notepad++ and some regex magic pulled out all the data I cared about in a minute. It would have taken years if my other coworker did it his way.

Funny student projects should have a different headline style or wording.

- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, fiction, how the “crazy” actions of people in relationships makes sense in the context of their individual history.

There’s one chapter about misunderstood words. The word “mother” was highly regarded by one character. They loved their mother, so to call someone a mother was a deep and powerful complement. The other character hated their mother, the word had a hypocritical meaning to her.

So when the first character complemented the second with the deepest most heart felt honor they could muster, the second character left them without a word.

They still can. A government doesn't have the need for first mover advantage because they have the power to make the official version. Also, the technology is very mature and best practices are better known. The userbase has been trained. And it's cheaper for them to do it now.

Though an official united states citizen email address has its own pitfalls for abuse, scams, and fraud.

These insurance underwriters seem like fun folks. While reading the fine print of my credit card insurance I noticed my purchases were covered from damages from "aircraft, spacecraft, or other vehicles".

Part of the cause of misinformation is that people want to believe in misinformation because it allows them to be part of their social group. The problem is that belief in certain facts will include you or exclude you from your social group and that some ideas in some social groups are not even allowed to be questioned. It's like all the bad parts of a religion that I hated: dogma, excommunication, blasphemy, and witch burnings.

- Dogma, a list of things you have to believe in to be part of the group.

- Excommunication, rejection from the group if you don't believe in the dogma. Depending on where you live, it's like killing a person.

- Blasphemy, the idea that some things are not allowed to be said out loud or even thought about.

- Witch burning, blaming a single person for all the problems of the village and then a mob of people attacking and killing that person.

Part of the solution is to stop treating social/political groups like a 16th century religion. Don't excommunicate people. Don't burn witches. There should be no such thing as blasphemy. It should be okay to ask hard questions without being accused of something horrible. Above all, groups need to embrace and celebrate a well proven proof, even if it contradicts the dogma.

That’s an interesting design. My only quibble is the 2600 degree “theoretical” max temperature of the building. That’s the just the melting point of steel, I’m sure something underneath the steel will hit it’s autoignition temperature well before the point that steel melts. For example the autoignition temperature of wood is 700 degrees.