During COVID I started taking almost daily walks as I drank from the firehose of taking over the code base for a mature software product.
I started tracked the walks using the CityStrides website which made it into a fun challenge. CityStrides lets you mark off streets in a city as "completed" once you've hit all the points on the street according to OpenStreetMap data. The goal being, if you so choose, to visit every street in your town.
I did manage to make 100% of all streets in my town - 300 some miles total? It's a really nice way to get out and about while learning more about where you live.
Man does this bring back memories of my old Atari 800 and entering or writing games in BASIC for it. Something extremely nostalgic about that kind of development for some of us.
I found a Thacher Cylindrical Slide Rule [1] in the garbage once at the university I worked at. I didn't have a holy grail list for such things, but it assumed that role when I found it.
> Google Cloud placed Railway’s production account into a suspended status incorrectly, as part of an automated action. This action extended to many accounts within Google Cloud. As this was a platform-wide action, there was no proactive outreach to individual customers prior to the restriction.
I'm interpreting that bit from Railway's blog to mean it wasn't just them that was impacted.
The US states of Oregon and Washington were major exporters of raw logs to Japan as well.
The 1962 Columbus Day Storm [1] fell 11.2 billion board feet of timber, which flooded the market and initiated heavy overseas demand. Exports peaked in the 80's. But when the export levels fell and old growth timber became more scarce, local economies of exporting regions took a big hit. The port of Coos Bay for example had a big downturn with lumber being the primary cargo of ships. Coos Bay is the only deep-water coastal harbor in Oregon and the largest between San Francisco and the Puget Sound.
At first I thought you were playing the Ad Hominem card there, but reading the article I'm assuming you mean to point out that the author seems like a rather interesting individual.
I like one of the introductory sentences where he says, "I am a strange person who has had a strange life, even relative to that of my strange and high achieving peers here."
As much as I should really care about this, I have to say... I don't. I should, but I don't.
To me it's a little bit like, "I love these new cellphones but I'm keeping it in airplane mode all the time because I don't want it online"
I mean what's the point of buying a new car if you're going to cripple features that are so much better because it's connected? Sure, use CarPlay or such, but to say forever end things like over the air software updates? Anything to prevent Kia from theoretically detecting sexual activity I suppose [1].
Just buy an old car. Or convert a classic into an EV [2].
There are A LOT of things in our lives that can be completely torn apart if one wants to. Glass is a vastly inferior window covering. Do you know how easy it breaks, and people can just look into it.
1
If you ask me, there's a whole whitepaper to be written about how to detect sexual activity in a Kia.
This is probably not the kind of approach to taking out new domain names you should encourage. A lot of other causes might think this is their way to set up an "official" representation of their strongly held political beliefs, and I think you can imagine where that might go with some groups.
I saw a talk by Brian Merchant (https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/) a while back where he talked a lot about the Luddites and their revolts against automation. He's definitely not a fan of AI, but it was very interesting to hear the comparisons of AI resistance now to Luddite resistance to automation in the 1800's.
There was unfortunately no Q&A in the lecture, as probably the one question I would have asked him was this: What if the Luddites had gotten their way? What do you imagine our society and world would be like right now?
It's not meant to be a trick question or a "gotcha" question. Society would indeed have been different. Maybe it would be all wonderfully Star Trek utopia and we'd have found a win-win for everyone. Or maybe we'd just be not nearly as technically advanced as a society as we are now.
There's one important difference: Automation worked and was affordable. Whether slop generation by LLMs is a useful instance of automation and how any productivity achieved stacks up against real, non-subsidized costs is currently a matter of (highly propagandized) opinion at best.
Steam engines weren't affordable to the average person when they were invented. Same as ai
And like steam, AI does some types of work quicker and easier than was previously possible.
Ai produces slop no doubt, but at the very minimum I can safely say it's here to stay for agentic coding, and I suspect it's the same for quite a few other industries as well. I won't lose my job to an AI agent, but I will lose to it to a human using an AI agent. That's technology,deal with it
Speaking of bullshittery, I don't really appreciate it's little game when it comes to trying to convince me to turn off JavaScript. It knows when you see it and you'll know when you see it.
As someone who likes to half read an article then come back to it later, this actually pissed me off. Messing with your favicon and the tab title so I can't actually find your article to finish reading it later feels hostile towards users like me. As such I blocked this URL entirely. I don't care what their motive behind it is, if you want to act sus then I don't want to be on your website.
have you ever needed a tab actually knowing that you've tabbed away?
disabling JS seems too large of a change, but basic privacy of "not having your tabbing habits tracked" seems to be one addon away (and it's scary that it isn't an option of the browser)
compared to ~every other site that wont let me read a simple paragraph of text without allowing 20+ other domains in noscript, i thought it was pretty funny.
I started tracked the walks using the CityStrides website which made it into a fun challenge. CityStrides lets you mark off streets in a city as "completed" once you've hit all the points on the street according to OpenStreetMap data. The goal being, if you so choose, to visit every street in your town.
I did manage to make 100% of all streets in my town - 300 some miles total? It's a really nice way to get out and about while learning more about where you live.
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