simplicio

I always find it kind of funny that after Cyberpunk was coined "X-punk" (steam-punk, diseal-punk, etc) became a construction to denote a particular type of "retro-future", sci-fi as imagined from a past time period.

This wasn't initially true of the word cyberpunk, but over the intervening years its become true, as cyberpunk has more and more denoted the future specifically as seen from the perspective of the 1980s and early 90's. Its become "retro-actively retro".

Yea, I have a couple of early memories that I can date from ~1-2 years old (early bday party, birth of sibling). And presumably a few more early memories are from that period but don't involve events I can assign a date to?

I kinda suspect this is true for a lot of people, but since memories aren't time-stamped, they don't realize how early they are.

Both shows were filmed around the same time and place in WA state and, as you note, had a kinda similar surrealist vibe. Which made watching them togeather kind of strange. Like Joel and his friends adorable hijinks were happening just down the street from a brutal murder investigation.

Extra strength tylenol is 500mg a tablet, so 20 pills. Think most of the accidental ODs are due to people not realizing its included in other cold meds, and also being loopy from whatever illness they're trying to manage, and so end up forgetting when they last took the meds.

Its also a pretty popular choice for people trying to kill themselves, though, so I suspect a non-trival chunk of ODs in the statistics given in the article were intentional.

The fix seems kind of crazy though, adding so much traffic overhead to every ssh session. I assume there's a reason they didn't go that route, but on a first pass seems weird they didn't just buffer password strokes to be sent in one packet, or just add some artificial timing jitter to each keystroke.

"They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it"

The first part is true, the second part pretty obviously isn't. Advertizers expect to net $ from ad buys, but most advertising isn't trying to increase a consumers total spending, its trying to drive that spending towards the companies products.

To give the most obvious example, the largest category of advertising is for food and beverage products. But no one thinks that if those ads all suddenly disappeared, people would stop buying food.

Sure, but a lot of that is 1) just influencing what type or brand you get of products your going to buy anyways, and 2) only an average, presumably wealthier consumers are "subsidizing" poorer ones, since they have more spending to be influenced.

Think the best argument against it is that it makes advertising less valuable, which in turn limits the how many "paid for with advertising" services will be available and how good those services will be.

Especially in a developing country where consumers ability to pay for such things is going to be limited, that will presumably deprive some margin of the population of media/services that are currently ad supported.

Maybe, but on the otherside, ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Like, I suspect a non-trivial percentage of people wouldn't have email if it weren't for gmail and other free w/ads services.

Heh, yea my parents were big on folk music so I heard the song a lot growing up, and was always vaguely puzzled how a such a large ship could get in so much trouble on just a lake.

I still remember the "oh I get it" moment when I visited Michigan as a teen and saw Lake Michigan for the first time.

Assuming it wasn't just luck, it seems impressive they managed to maximize their (landing attempts/fuel reserves) ratio like that.

I think there have been about 5 different contexts over the years where I've been surprised by how good an insulator a pile of dirt is.

Bilbo doesn't see him wear it, but he's described as having put it on to steal goblin children for food. So he does wear it in the books.

Its on such an expedition that the ring "slips" from him, further suggesting the ring is actually not only his size, but a little large.

Also the ring fits both Gollum and Bilbo, which limits how different in size they could be.

(LOTR says the ring can change size, but this wasn't discussed in the Hobbit, and presumably hadn't occurred to Tolkien yet when he wrote it).

The $ argument in favor of this seems a little silly. The $ brought in a millionth of the US military budget.

Think the best argument presented in the piece is just that some non-trivial fraction of soldiers are going to gamble, and its better they do so in a manor controlled by the military then backroom poker games, online, etc.

Eh, I feel like my (and most peoples) main exposure to house parties was in HS and college when basically no one owns their own home. Rented apartments, houses and family homes seemed to work fine then, I can't really think why that wouldn't be the case now.

Note the age-group with the biggest drop is 15-24, its not like the average 18 year old owned their own home circa 1995.

RIP one of my favorite trivia facts

FWIW, think 3-4 is kind of the low-point for this. After that, they're in school more, can independently play by themselves or with friends more and your time (very) gradually starts to become your own again. (they also become more interesting to hang out with after this age, can participate in more interesting activities, etc)

I mean, if the devices exist, I'm skeptical its that hard to just give them to whomever you want to use them and give them all DoD accounts or whatever. The people involved being in different agencies seems like a dodge.

Think the qualification is to get into the training program, presumably air traffic controllers who develop near nearsightedness later in life aren't summarily fired.

Still, seems like a crazy requirement.

Im kinda skeptical these folks were following some hyper-logical process from flawed axioms that led them to the rigorous solution: "I should go stab our land-lord with a samurai sword" or "I should start a shootout with the Feds".

The rationalist stuff just seems like some meaningless patter they stuck ontop of more garden variety cult stuff.

Yea, was reading a biography of (JPL founder) Jack Parsons a few weeks ago, and was struck how similar the Zizian patter sounded to a lot of the Golden Dawn/proto-Scientology stuff.

Eh? There's a ton of Native American place-names on the East Coast? Including at least three States.

I don't really get the revenue angle though. The AI posts don't seem to be trying to drive traffic to ads or anything. I really don't understand the point of auto-generating a bunch of AI gibberish under the name of old users on ones own site?

I'm generally pretty open to the idea that the NRC is bad and needs to be reformed, but a year and a half doesn't seem that unreasonable? Especially for a new reactor design.

Seems intuitively obvious. On a flat Earth the two distances would be the same, and while the Earth isn't flat, its close enough to approximate a flat surface for most purposes, so you'd expect the differences in the two arcs to be ~0

Feel like people who are old enough to remember that 6 week period in the 90's where those Magic Eye 3d Stereogram pictures were everywhere have a big advantage here.

Interesting. Webpage's creator seems to be the son of the Seyfert who was the namesake of the galaxy type.

I mean...I feel like lots of rules are changed by people just saying they don't like the rule? Modern society would be pretty unworkable if the only way to change any rule was public rebellion.

(Plus, its not really clear to me that Carlson actually cares about the dress code rule? By his own admission, he broke it by accident, not like a concious act of rebellion, and his issue seems to have been with the way it was then enforced rather then the rule itself.)

I don't think keeping the data processing abilities of modern gov'ts below that of 1930's Germany is really a plausible plan for avoiding concentration camps.