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.
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.
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.
>We’ve heard our users loud and clear - interoperable end to end encryption (E2EE) across email providers is critical for privacy and security online. We have taken this feedback to heart. We are proud to announce support for PGP encryption inside Skiff mail starting today for all users across all tiers, including Free.
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.
“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).
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).
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.
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...