stephenhuey

If we got down to only one language, that natural human tendency would be for new languages to grow out of that. They naturally change all the time, and suppressing that is a loss, not a gain.

Did you get an offer????

The most powerful observational tool in the universe would not show 35 anywhere near Houston.

Many years ago, there was a trend to show a different website, sometimes on a different domain and often with more differences than just a mobile version of the stylesheet. Sometimes the mobile version was not updated enough, or there was a reduction in functionality, hence the paranoia.

Per year, but still amazing. I'd like to think of myself who knows what he is doing, but I just launched a Rails-based platform for a client on web, iOS and Android, and had to spend an annoying amount of time in Google Play and App Store Connect. $299 would be a tiny fraction of the billable hours I'd have to spend messing around in there, and that's not counting mobile app dev time at all, so I'm on the lookout for a good candidate project to try Ruby Native on!

Thought this was going to be about the new Ruby Native!

https://rubynative.com

“From bundle install to your phone in minutes. To the App Store and Google Play without a line of native code.“

I'm hoping it's likely the powerful cannot monopolize agents. If open models are easy to obtain, and every homestead has solar and large batteries, everyone can routinely charge their robots like Seven of Nine plugging into her Borg alcove. As long as they have the right to repair them, and a monopoly can't fleece you with robot maintenance!

Yellowstone park rangers killed the last wolves there in 1926, and by the middle of the 20th century, the total population in the Lower 48 had been reduced to a few hundred in Minnesota and Michigan.

https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/wolf-managemen...

This map shows how now there are nearly 7,000 in the contiguous states of the USA:

https://nywolf.org/learn/u-s-wolf-populations/

Half an hour west of me. Here's a gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/21/us/tesla-autopilot-crash-...

If you look at that doorbell cam footage, you'll see it's racing fast on a neighborhood street, fails to turn, and plows into the house. Here's an article published yesterday with multiple vantage points:

https://abc13.com/post/katy-family-mourning-grandmother-kill...

And this one from today has Tesla's VP of Auto-Pilot saying the driver manually overrode self-driving mode:

https://abc13.com/post/katy-family-mourning-grandmother-kill...

I was one of the earliest on FB. It's mostly an address book for me now. I'm sad sooooo many acquaintances and relatives are there, and yes, it would be a lot of effort to get their contact info or get them to use other messaging platform (but I've started doing that).

For 15+ years, I've thought long and hard countless times about what could sustainably replace social media platforms that do not serve us well. I know a paid app is not super likely to succeed, although WhatsApp did use to cost a dollar! It seems like a nonprofit wouldn't be that great, and so I wonder about a mission-driven public benefit corporation (not to be confused with a B corp, though it could be one of those too). Of course it has to be cool or no one would use it. Not a fuddy duddy wannabe social network. Anyway, to sustain itself, would ads or paid offerings (that don't harvest personal data) be successful?

Happy to discuss with anyone interested!

Good point. If only the evil we must fight was as simple as Skynet. Reality is much sadder since people are hurting people.

T2 and Abyss were trailblazers. I remember on the T2 director’s commentary how they were so amazed when they got the effects back months later because they’d never seen anything so good.

Yes, I’ve made multiple Jumpstart iOS & Android apps that work with Jumpstart Rails and the speed is awesome.

We must turn back the tide on American microwave culture. Life isn't just about my time, my money...we share life with others, and life is so much better because of it.

I also had an older relative who took me to a nice restaurant several years ago. He had gone to that same restaurant since the 1970s and even though it had changed names over the years, he usually asked for the same waiter, an older man who had worked there for decades. They had chatted about their kids and other things in life. Maybe they weren't the most intimate of friends, but I've felt this same desire in some coffee shops and restaurants, where I want to talk to the same employee again and catch up on at least a couple of things we've discussed before. Maybe we don't do that with every business transaction, but it's nice to experience every now and then.

There were some people living outside that perimeter, but I just included the Seven Hills and the Campus Martius because it was a typical border for the city and was densely packed with maybe a million people. Teotihuacan possibly had up to 200,000 people, so a bit more breathing room.

Oh, didn't realize that. Any recommendation for mitigating that if deployed there? Had thought about putting something on Vultr in a few months. Also open to any other good recommendations for providers that have a managed Postgres.

It was a carefully planned large city with the road along the main axis pointed at 15 degrees east of north, and the large pyramids were integrated into the city's design, but we definitely don't know who did that planning. Hundreds of apartment compounds were standardized. Tens of cubic meters of earth were moved and they had to quarry lots of basalt and other stone.

There is strong evidence it was a multi-ethnic city, especially since there are distinct ethnic neighborhoods based on artifacts such as pottery. No trace of writing or how the city and government were organized, and whether a ruling elite called the shots or if there were ruling families from different ethnic groups working together.

I've been to Cahokia, and look forward to revisiting it in future decades since only 10% has been excavated so far!

Comparatively few historical ruins built out of materials that would have lasted this long, but a long history, actually, and some you can still see...

Mexico City is a quick plane ride from the USA, and while some of their ruins are buried, you can hop a short bus ride outside the city to walk among standing ruins of Teotihuacan, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere at the time Jesus walked on the Earth. It was 20 square kilometers whereas Rome at the height of the empire had only 14 square kilometers within the Aurelian Walls.

I've been on the Great Wall of China and all over the world and Teotihuacan was fascinating for me to see. Even more intriguing, no one knows who built it. Aztecs discovered it many centuries after it was abandoned and forever wondered about its origin.

Inching closer to Vultr prices. There are some Rails projects I might have later this year, and I had already been thinking of putting them onto Vultr via Hatchbox since Vultr offered a managed db. Maybe for some stuff that I can run a Rails 8 Solid Stack app with just sqlite, I'd use Hetzner. I tested both with Hatchbox but have nothing in production on either yet and generally use Heroku and Render still.

Has anyone here used Vultr much? I'm curious how they felt about bang for buck. At least with Hatchbox it's easy to run multiple domains on one box.

I'm ok with him being omitted from the film, but I'm glad the novel could afford more space for someone like him, a foil to the mood of impending doom, and also just plain fun. He rescued them and equipped them, and one of the weapons he supplied played a pivotal role later. Merry would not have been successful without that blade, and Tom is a believable source for such immense help. There's a book of Tolkien's letters and in letter 144 he explicitly says he intended Tom to be an enigma because he felt there should be some in the mythical age of the story.

"Old knives are long enough as swords for hobbit-people," he said. "Sharp blades are good to have, if Shire-folk go walking, east, south, or far away into dark and danger." Then he told them that these blades were forged many long years ago by Men of Westernesse: they were foes of the Dark Lord, but they were overcome by the evil king of Carn Dûm in the Land of Angmar.

"Few now remember them," Tom murmured...

https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_144

https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_153

https://tolkienessays.com/tom.html

As I said, I didn't find the article or podcast I was thinking of. You're right that it may not be the tacked-on fees. Artists generally do not have much leverage against the monopoly (some artists get more say). It might be some things like platinum pricing that I'm thinking of, and how people think Ticketmaster raised the prices but the artists benefit without having to take the heat. Artists and promoters have a lot of influence over what are called the fair-value prices, the number of tickets released, whether to opt into dynamic or premium pricing, whether they can officially be resold, and VIP package prices. Again, plenty of artists don't like working with the monopoly, but I had just remembered such an aha moment when I heard they frequently benefit financially from certain practices the fans don't like.

You know what? Might have been Freakonomics:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-the-live-event-ticke...

Just tried searching for a long-form article I read in recent years. Wish I could find it, but obviously the facts are not a secret. It explained in depth all the problems with the monopoly, but it also pointed out something very surprising to me. A few artists have spoken out angrily on behalf of their fans. However, the fact is, the artists in general do financially benefit from Ticketmaster's way of doing things. Part of Ticketmaster's business model is taking the heat from the fans who don't like paying all the extra fees so that the anger is not directed at the artists. If an artist wants to set the floor at $150 but knows fans might be upset, they can drop the price 30% and TicketMaster can help them make up the difference in fees, and Ticketmaster has nothing to lose. The artists get to keep their reputation intact instead of appearing greedy to fans.

When a professor at Rice walked us through Don Tapscott's book Growing up Digital in 2001, we had such an optimistic view of the future. Don highlighted how with broadcast media in the 20th century, the viewer had little choice on what to watch. Now that the internet was available to the masses, he explained how much new generations would benefit from what he called interactive media which enabled someone to explore and learn anything of interest instead of being forced to consume whatever was being fed through the television. When we'd say there was "nothing on" we felt bored, and maybe we did endure some manipulation by commercials, but I agree that contemporary social media is far worse. In the 20th century, boredom from channel surfing at least encouraged some to get off the couch and go read a book or shoot some hoops or play a board game with friends. Allow me the stereotype (exaggeration?) for a moment to note that we had the ultimate nerdy kid who wanted to be cool, and all he could think of with gazillions of dollars at his disposal was to make a thing that turned everyone into anti-social nerds by staying glued to their screens instead of interacting IRL with fellow humans. Who would have accepted that fictional plot as believable?

https://dontapscott.com/books/growing-digital/

What was that mantra? Something about broken software is what they aim for?

In the years before the subprime mortgage meltdown, I was writing code at a massive bank. Didn’t have an iPhone yet and Gmail was blocked on the work computers, so I’d step across the street during the middle of the workday to sign into a law school library and use their computers to check my personal email. A lot of friends still didn’t want to spend money on per-message SMS fees so I could find out if anyone was inviting me to do something after work in my Gmail inbox (a lot of us used Gchat in those days but the only way I could access it was on a desktop/laptop, no mobile yet).

I agree that these days it’s vastly easier to avoid crossing streams since we all have a personal mobile smartphone.

Ah, I see. Pardon me making him a scapegoat. My rant in between bouts of wrestling with mobile sandbox subscription testing weirdness should have been directed at a vague cohort of less considerate SV folks, so instead I wish to thank him for trying to make the world a better place, and I wouldn't mind if he invited me skiing or flying sometime so we can discuss how I can help him make the world a better place. :)

Before Facebook, I used Friendster. Years later, I read how Friendster execs were too busy patting themselves on the back and flying around on private jets to get around to fixing the horrendous site lag of sometimes a minute to even sign into the web app. How could a company's leadership be so foolish? I understood this paled in comparison to the doomed arrogance of IBM's leaders when I read stories about IBM's downfall in the delightful book In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters.