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The Straight White American Jesus podcast did a deep-dive on Thiel's thinking recently. It wasn't what I was expecting but then I hadn't previously been paying attention to him. Apparently he's all about tech-utopinism with himself as the King and no regard for the fate of his fellow non-tech-utopian human, as in his mind such people are just holding back human progress.

I haven't watched any of his Antichrist talks but I take it that he's not thinking of this entity in the Christian sense. Instead the Antichrist is a person with some amount of power who is trying to find solutions to mankind's problems using the tools of the old order, rather than through technology and its kings.

https://www.straightwhiteamericanjesus.com/episodes/brad-unf...

If the U.S. ever goes to war with a major adversary, one of the first waves of cyberattacks will likely target infrastructure that rarely comes up in discussions about digital threats: railroads.

I wrote TSR's that snatched cycles off the timer interrupt

We've all been there. How else could you get anything interesting done back in the day?

Having grown up in New England in the era, I remember "acid rain" being a big concern too. The polluters fought to keep anything from being done about the problem, but decades later some steps were actually taken by the US government (and others) and apparently there's been a fair amount of success.

I agree, now that "corporations are people" in the US it's hard to imagine being able to successfully battle them and force large-scale, cross-industry environmental-health measures to be taken. That is, unless it so happens that such measures maximize short-term profits in some way.

And more tape drives. But Space:1999's moon base still had a huge number of Blinkenlights and related gear that I have to believe was under an expensive IBM support contract. I wonder if the company found a way to get out of the contract? Some clause requiring the moon remain in its historic orbit maybe?

Here you go. This is the second time in the past few years that cat was used to process bikers in the NW WA wilderness. The first time was fatal. I used to live about 15min from where this incident occurred. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/cougar-attacks-cyc...

Not to suggest that the phenomena are necessarily related (though it wouldn't surprise me), there's also this:

Sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP) is a fatal complication of epilepsy. It is defined as the sudden and unexpected, non-traumatic and non-drowning death of a person with epilepsy, without a toxicological or anatomical cause of death detected during the post-mortem examination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUDEP .

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PBS Space Time just did an episode on this topic: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=vyEWLhOfLgQ

Use it again! Thunderbird has a built-in Usenet client and you can configure it to connect to any number of NNTP servers.

comp.lang.python is one of the busier (programming) groups as well.

*Hanford.

"Stop Time" - a 1967 memoir by Frank Conroy. [1]

Next up, "Inequality In An Age of Decline" by Paul Blumberg (1980) [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-Time

[2] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/paul-blumberg/i...

Spamgourmet (https://www.spamgourmet.com, https://github.com/spamgourmet/spamgourmet), free, has always worked well for me though these days I tend to just use the disposable addresses built in to Fastmail. Addy.io, (https://addy.io/), free/paid, is a newer offering with some nifty features like automatic PGP encryption.

Re: hiking, your comment reminded me of this recent write-up in the Seattle Times. It's hard to imagine serious hikers hitting the trail in the PNW without at least one person in the party carrying the relevant Green Trails paper maps, but I suppose they exist.

https://www.seattletimes.com/life/outdoors/seattle-mapmaker-...

“Your devices aren’t big enough to show you the context at any level of detail that from our point of view would be useful,” he said, citing the possibility of needing to find an escape route in a wildfire. “If you unfold a map, you can see where you are and get a better handle on where you can go.”

Coburn’s stewardship also resulted in the durable quality of today’s Green Trails maps. Made of Polyart tearproof synthetic paper, with special ink to shade topographic relief, and printed at Capitol City Press in Olympia, these maps have a clear selling point: waterproof, solar-powered, no batteries required."

Masons. Where these do exist, they've been gender integrated.

Not true of the Regular Freemasons at any rate - "The attitude of most regular Anglo-American grand lodges remains that women Freemasons are not legitimate Masons" (Wikipedia).

edit:spelling

Similar: I was a kid in S. VT in the 60s/70s and everyone using the phone system used five-digit dialing. You were assigned a 254-xxxx or 257-xxxx number, but when dialing you only had to use the last five #s, as the "25" prefix was implicit. I think there was a bias on the part of the phone company for assigning 254- prefixes to residences and 257- ones to businesses, but I'm not sure how strict they were about it. I can't recall if using the full seven digits worked when calling within those two prefixes, but I think that it did. I don't remember anyone ever using alphabetic prefixes, which makes me wonder if they were perhaps used there before I was born or if it was a convention only in big cities (my town was ~10K, a bit under).

Eternal September, mentioned in the article, is good. Another that I know of is https://solani.org/ .

Have you had a look at Coconut? I don't know if it'll push all your buttons but whenever I hear someone who's reasonably content with Python but wants more FP goodies I always think of it. https://github.com/evhub/coconut . It's basically a superset of Python3 that transpiles into Python3 and is compatible with MyPy. I don't think I'd code Python w/o it ever again assuming I had the choice. The biggest negative for me is that there's no IDE support for the language last I looked, though of course you can work with the transpiler output (plain Python) in your favorite Python IDE. It might be fun to play around with, I know that I really enjoyed it but then I got spoiled by the language+tooling of Scala3, but if you don't have that option ...

Thanks. I'm fortunate not to live in Medical Lake or nearby, where the most destructive fires (in terms of $damage$ anyway) are still ongoing.

I know little about these air quality sites, how accurate they are, or if they are all measuring the same things in a normalized way. I just latched on to the PurpleAir info, as I'd at least once seen the site favorably mentioned here on HN and the UI is pretty tolerable to me. If the world is going to burn around me I should probably study-up on such things rather than, oh, on the latest Scala db access lib. :-) The local media is referencing aqi.in as a source, not sure if this is related to your aqicn one:

"SPOKANE, Wash. - Five of the top ten cities with the worst air quality in the world are in the Spokane Metro area, according to aqi.in. Mead sits at number one with an AQI of 502. Spokane is number four with an AQI of 444. Airway Heights is ranked sixth with an AQI of 426. Spokane Valley sits at number eight with an AQI 392. Cheney is sitting at number ten with an AQI of 370." https://inx.lv/mi5K [khq.com]

The outside light this afternoon was truly dim due to the haze - I could see smoke in the air less than 50' away. Eyes watering, awful smell ... I can't imagine what that AQI=1000 Beijing experience would have been like ... almost seems non-survivable, at least if it's the same sort of pollutants. We're getting organic ash (yes, we paid xtra for it!) from grass/trees/shrubbery &etc but also getting the combustion products from hundreds of houses+vehicles that have gone up in flames over the past few days. All kinds of plastics and rubber and electronics ingredients I would think.

I haven't heard if all this is going to blow towards Seattle or PDX but if it does they're not gonna be happy. We'll have to figure out how to blame it on Canadians if it does cross the Cascades.

Sock it to us, BC.

"OKANOGAN COUNTY, Wash. — The Crater Creek fire, that has burned an estimated 54,000 acres in British Columbia, has entered into Okanogan County." https://inx.lv/mi5t

I'm in Spokane, and on the PurpleAir website there are readings >500 all around, even in the city, which is not (yet) burning. The air outside is subjectively awful, the worst I can recall in 20 years living here. I'll be holing-up today with fans/filters running, not that it will do much good.

What's burning, at least nearby, is not forests AFAIK, it's grasslands.

Same for me, and I'm not using a VPN.

Your words about play, creativity and fun, and the maximization thereof, bring to mind a gem of an essay from Bob Black that I first encountered back in the days when 640K was enough for anyone. Dinosaur days. It's called "The Abolition of Work" and I've always assumed that most nerds like me had probably read it but maybe not. It made a big, and lasting impression on me, and I suspect that many here who feel drawn to this HN thread will find the Black piece to have some thought-provoking ideas in it.

"No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution."

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolit...

Oh Pascal!, oh the nostalgia. I saved up the princely sum of $80-$100 back in TRS-80 Model III days to buy the Pascal 80 package, the New Classics version, which was basically a proto-IDE, and a pretty sweet one at the time. http://www.trs-80.org/pascal-80/ I recall it being a huge step up from the M-III BASIC dev environment and the games and utilities I wrote ran well enough in the 48K of RAM that was available. I wonder what became of the Pascal-80 codebase? Not that it would be any better than the modern tools available for retro hardware, probably far worse. Oh yeah, "Oh Pascal!" was the book from which I learned the language, and I doubt there were many other options, as this predated Pascal's commercial use by quite a few years.

My 1911, 3br/1ba in-city Spokane house cost me about $90K in 2003, currently appraised+taxed at around $300K as you say. I've no idea how ordinary people [that is, those w/o high incomes and/or high levels of wealth], and especially renters, are getting by. From what I read in it the local forums and see at the food bank every week, a lot aren't getting by.

+1 for UU. I'm not formally a member, but as far as churches go it's one of the few that I know of that atheist me might be able to tolerate. If you would prefer Xian, Jesus-y content with your (still quite-liberal) church, another to consider would be the UUC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Church_of_Christ . Also Unity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_Church . 'Unity describes itself as "for people who might call themselves spiritual but not religious."' If you ever are in the KC area, Unity Village is a nice place to visit, the church has a beautiful campus there.

That was a wonderful comic slip-up and brought a smile to my face. TY for that! And now I'm wondering if I can go to a lawyer and get a "no-regurgitate" directive put in place. :-)

It's odd that the article doesn't seem to touch at all on the automated scambaiting systems that exist, such as the legendary Lenny: https://www.youtube.com/c/ToaoDotNet/videos .

The IBM CS 9000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_9000 When I interned @IBM in the mid-80s we had a (computer) lab full of these things. Each had a 68K CPU with (I think) 128K of RAM, a little mono green monitor, and external 8" floppies for storage. All of them running the multi-tasking CSOS operating system.

I never hear them mentioned these days which strikes me as odd though it may be just that I'm not really plugged into the vintage community. It could also be that there are simply none to be had anywhere now. I never hacked on them myself - we already had quite a few 1st-gen PCs in the lab and I worked on those. I seem to recall that our CS9000 app devs were coding in some version of Pascal (possibly cross-compiled from a mainframe) and that there was some form of proprietary connectivity with the site's local System/370.

At some point the lab also obtained a "portable" PC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Portable_Personal_Computer) which was a god-awful, big, heavy beast. However I can't say that I find those "interesting" and IIRC most of the devs even then were mainly interested in avoiding having to use it.

I used to think it was strange that, considering it was already selling CS9000s, IBM didn't base its entry into the general-purpose PC market on a stripped-down version of the hardware and on CSOS.