stolenmerch

Honest, good faith question here. One stated goal of building this is because you "deleted most social media, but still wanted a way to keep in touch with friends and my network." How does this solve that? Keeping in touch is not about the web presence, it's about the network. How does this work differently than something like about.me?

I've been doing this for the past couple of weeks after reading this tweet: https://twitter.com/obryant666/status/1395816947913138178

It's oddly fulfilling.

I think there's an inflection point after learning the basics of syntax, variables, data structures, control structures, etc. where you see how things fit together and your goals feel attainable instead of murky and unknowable. You may not be great with best practices or architecting complex programs, but you actually "know how to program" and can create what you want or need.

I was so incredibly hungry for any and all personal computer content as a kid in the 80s that I'd stay up for Computer Chronicles on Sunday nights just to sit through 20 minutes of dry discussions of financial software to catch a 30 second B-roll of some guy dialing into a bank with their Compaq Portable. It was sublime.

Correct. It was always something like PRINT "HELLO. I AM YOUR NEW TRS-80 MICROCOMPUTER [0] or PRINT "HI, I'M YOUR NEW COLOR COMPUTER" [1]

[0] https://archive.org/details/TRS80ModelIPreliminaryUsersManua...

[1] https://ia801905.us.archive.org/30/items/Getting_Started_wit...

You may be interested in Collapse OS, a "Forth operating system and a collection of tools and documentation with a single purpose: preserve the ability to program microcontrollers through civilizational collapse".

http://collapseos.org

It's a huge nostalgia trap for me too. Probably because we can't go back. There's nothing else that brings me the same feeling. For people of a certain age, it's almost like being homesick for the house you grew up in. Sometimes I'll dink around setting up a Syncronet board or connect to House of Lunduke or something, but it's never the same. You just can't recapture the magic.

In retrospect it was such a brief, intense love affair. For me it started in 1990 when I bought a modem from the back of a magazine in high school, installed it in my Tandy 1000 myself, and used every penny of pay from my job on long-distance calls. When I went to college I was the only student in the dorms who could dial into our school's Sun System and telnet to ISCABBS, so our room became a late night hang out for friends every night. I still visted ISCA for a while at my first job out of college, but it just petered out as the web became prominent.

What I would give to discover a new technology that inspired so much wonder and optimism.

I have no doubt that there is a correlation and I did read the Bayesian Vector Autoregression paper. However, I think it's a bit misleading for a doctor to take to social media with some very casual observations of Amazon reviews and make confident claims that covid is about to "surge" so therefore we should all return to masking. I need a lot more than just his screenshots of the reviews. I need to see the cases actually surging. They aren't in most of the world. One of his "no scent" reviews was actually just a subjective review that the scent isn't strong enough. The others were from a week ago. His linked article claims "COVID-19 cases predicted more “no smell” reviews. For every 100,000 new COVID-19 cases per week, he found, “no smell” reviews increased by a quarter of a percentage point in the next week." So shouldn't we have seen this surge already?

This just feels sloppy to me.

I was a big fan of Endless Quest for similar reasons. Loved CYOA, but loved the non-linear narrative along with tracking stats throughout your story.

Same here. Software dev with an MFA in Studio Art. Generative Art was a topic 20 years ago in school and my feeling it was politely tolerated as conceptual, but not aesthetic. The difference now is that the models and algorithms and amount of data actually produce decent results. GPT-3 writing as opposed to the markov chain experimental writing decades ago is profound. Image creation even more so.

I see exactly this backlash in most art schools until eveything is so mingled a new generation just doesn't care.

Don't worry about special "kid friendly" rpgs. Just play D&D but water it way down. Get some miniatures and map tiles and let them set up the map to explore with their characters. They will want to play with these things as toys rather than a TTRPG and that's perfectly fine. Just establish the basic rule of "rolling higher than a number". Improvise like crazy, let them re-roll but set some appropriate boundaries, and let them guide the fun.

> a ballistic justification for both damage and armor

You may be intrigued by Phoenix Command. Written by a literal rocket scientist, it offers a level of granularity down to time-of-flight of bullets, penetration factors of various materials, and much more. Not everyone's cup of tea as you can imagine.

It seems the annual income vs. CPI is the core chart here. Something happened in the decade of 2000-2010 to throw things out of whack. I'm not informed enough to know if that was the result of policy decisions or what, but I'd like to know how wage growth declined so dramatically during this time while prices seemed to maintain its projected linear growth.

One problem is that both sides of this "schism" tends to easily fall into a Cosy Catastrophe mindset [0]. Not always, but it happens quite a bit. They touch on this in the article, but it's too common in my opinion. It's tempting to start daydreaming about an escapist fantasy where you've prepped exactly right and society collapses exactly how you want it or thought it would happen. Maybe it's a world where you can violently defend your homestead against bandits. Maybe it's a world where all your hungry neighbors band together in harmony to protect one another. The truth is a long-term scenario that would require prepping would be chaotic beyond anything you can imagine and yet parts of society would continue on exactly as before.

[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CosyCatastrophe

Not exactly a screenshot, but I recently found a file from December 1991 that was a proprietary image file of the home screen of a local BBS I used to visit in high school. Was actually able to convert it to a PNG after some work. This might be my oldest file that I personally saved to disk. Now if only I had all those cassette tapes from my TRS-80.

It's probably too basic for anyone who's taken even college-level math courses, but I thought it was an engaging summer read that got my imagination going. Easy to read but also required some work. It was fun to imagine examples of everyday life as geometric objects -- but you probably have to be in the mood for that to enjoy it.

I just read this story in Jordan Ellenberg's book, "Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else" as part of the section on decision trees, evaluating state, etc. Tinsley is the GOAT.

I've never found editing Wikipedia to be a pleasant experience. Unless it's a totally obscure topic, there are just too many people who feel entitled ownership to the page and will fight you on every edit. This isn't exactly the abuse described here, but it feels bad when you just want to help. I tried adding the marriage of a celebrity couple once on the day it happened and someone was there to make sure THEY got to add it by reverting my changes until I just gave up.

In 2000, artist John Freyer cataloged then sold all of his possessions on eBay. It was documented in a website and book published by Bloomsbury [0], later optioned by Warner Brothers, and Freyer made all the talk show rounds in 2002-3 [1]

[0] https://www.allmylifeforsale.com

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSmCwMRWPMM

I was infatuated with Eliza as a kid, thanks to its inclusion in David Ahl's "More BASIC Computer Games". It was my first foray into modifying someone else's code and trying to figure out how it worked. Something about this program was like jet fuel for my young imagination. The author of this article and founder of elizagen.org is Jeff Shrager, who was the first to convert Eliza from LISP to BASIC.

https://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/showpage.php?pa...

~75% of those deaths were among people of retirement age or older. I think it's fair to question whether it was "reasonable precaution" to shut down schools, people's workplace, and entire sectors of the economy. Simply showing the total body count doesn't even begin to describe the complexity of balanced risk assessment for younger people and what was allowed to be considered a "disingenuous narrative" or not.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

Would be interesting to hear a few other perspectives from finance, manufacturing, or tech. Not that she's necessarily wrong, but I need some opinions on this other than from a veterinarian with a twitter presence seemingly dedicated to hating Elon Musk.

I personally don't have the stomach to develop in public like this, let alone in front of the gaming community, let alone a beloved franchise. Not even sure what level of attacks he experienced, but I assume it would be enough to push me offline while working. Wish it wasn't like this, but part of me assumes this comes with the territory and you either mitigate it or just don't share work until it's released.

This is something I did pretty early on and my colleagues said the results were bad or not worth pursuing. Now that we can all do it it's going to become HATED.

Wow, blast from the past! I can't believe I'm seeing Lion Kimbro on Hacker News. "How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think" went very mildly viral in 2003 or so and I was in school at the time. I became kinda fascinated with his speakeasy.net page (which never changed, even to this day) and his advocacy for RDF and web ontologies, which was totally foreign to me at the time. I always thought his quote "Data and Algorithms are not Aware. Time is an Invention of Awareness" was so badass in 2003. This page is part of what lead me to study computer programming. Dang. What a nostalgia rush.

I'd recommend doing some of the free Stanford or MIT CS courses online and really trying as if you needed the credits to graduate. Don't quit when it gets hard because ultimately you want to be compensated for not quitting when problems get hard.

Teachers make 13% more than the average salary across the U.S., yet public perception is that they are horribly underpaid. No one is getting rich being a teacher, but they are certainly paid a decent wage. It's a hard job but most jobs are hard. I know a ton of school teachers. It's true they put in extra work each night but every single one of them has the summer off to relax and recharge. They are also free to work another job in the summer to supplement their salary.

https://www.business.org/hr/workforce-management/best-us-sta...

An engraved granite tombstone with the haiku repeated in multiple languages. Convince a lot of people to add this to their grave when they die. A cemetery is likely to remain stable as hallowed, undisturbed ground for many thousands of years. Even if future civilizations (the time frame we're talking about) forget and don't realize they're building on a burial ground, once they discover it it will be recognized as important to preserve. Burial and death rituals will likely remain preserved for 10k years. For fun, add a base64 encoded data uri representation of the haiku on the monument.

My parents bought their first home in 1981 with a 30-year fixed rate mortgage of 16% interest. Imagine essentially putting a house on a credit card. They refinanced a few times and just kept plugging away at payments their entire working lives. Seemed fine to me, but I was also a kid and have no idea how much stress they actually went through. This was a $65,000 house with two incomes of about $6/hour each. Not sure how that compares to today's market.