jaza

Cycling through the Andes mountains is far more appealing to most people than cycling through the Brazilian savanna is, for various practical reasons. Steep and windy vs flat and tedious. Sweeping varying scenery vs close-range monotonous scenery. Sometimes cool vs always hot. Dry dirt (in dry season at least) vs muddy dirt. Less bugs vs more bugs. Less (although still quite a few) infectious diseases vs full-on tropical infectious diseases.

I've tried (more than once) to learn salsa, I did about as well as most white male programmers do at it. :P

Yes, sadly, coding is a skill that can and (before long) will be forgotten by all but a niche dedicated few. It will go the way of assembly language, smith-ing, weaving, bread-baking, meat- / fish-gutting, hunting, remembering phone numbers, driving manual (and, before long, driving in human mode), hand-writing, horse-riding, wood-chopping... you get the picture. The price of progress!

AFAIK Hacker News was built (about 2 decades ago) by Paul Graham completely in Lisp (I assume with CGI) and AFAIK that's still how it runs today.

Back in the 1990s, thousands of non-devs the world over built "software" using Excel and VBA macros. Devs then spent much of the 2000s rewriting that mess using more robust alternatives. I think this will just be groundhog day all over again: the 2020s is magical miracle AI software-generating software, and the 2030s will be the grown-ups coming back to clean up the dumpster fires.

"The equal but opposite of the one-child-policy" is easier said than done. A brute-force approach worked for stopping more babies (I don't know if it's true, but what I heard back was that back in the 80s Chinese officials literally killed unauthorised babies moments after they were born - that's probably exaggerated, however they really did carry out forced sterilisations and forced abortions). It wouldn't work so well for creating more babies. You can't force people to have more children. Many countries are offering financial incentives for producing babies right now - cash at birth, free house, free childcare, etc - with limited success. I don't see how China could deliver (hahaha aren't I punny) a significantly different result if it goes down that same road.

Not that strange, actually, once you understand the geography and ethnography. First of all (although not that significant), straight line distance between the population centres of AU and PNG is further than that of AU and NZ: Sydney to Port Moresby ~4 hours by direct flight, Sydney to Auckland ~3 hours. More significantly, the whole ~1000km length of Cape York Peninsula is one hell of a barrier: virtually uninhabited, no sealed roads most of the way, and extremely inhospitable (cyclones and mass flooding for several months every year, killer crocodiles / jellyfish everywhere, prevalence of dengue fever / malaria).

The Torres Strait Islanders are genetically and culturally part of the peoples of New Guinea, which is why here in Australia we refer to "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples", why the TSIs have their own flag that's different to the Aboriginal flag, etc. We non-indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand share the same predominantly British ancestry, a very similar (and intertwined) colonial / post-colonial history, etc.

In all except the very least-developed countries in the world today, being without electricity for more than a few days would quickly result in significant lawlessness, starvation, and water shortages. So not an "extinction level event", but quite feasibly a "collapse of nation-states as we know them" event.

Also missing (a big chunk of) the Indian Pacific (east to west coast, has passenger services several times a week).

Indeed - the enshittification of the enshittification!

I think the author's main point is bemoaning the loss of human-crafted works (he mentions coding and the paintbrush). (Putting "slaves" in the title is IMHO a poorly worded distraction from that point.)

I get it (with coding at least), I too have spent decades hand-crafting code, and I take pride in the fruit of my labour, and it saddens me to think that I and my peers are perhaps like the blacksmiths of a century or so ago, ie the final generation doing what we do in significant numbers. But I have faith that there will always be a new kind of blacksmith.

When you think about it honestly, we really don't know anything about anything. We don't know how many planets there are in the galaxy (nor in the universe, nor in the multiverse, nor if there is a multiverse). We don't know what the chances are of a given planet being habitable (nor what "habitable (for all possible life)" means, nor what "all possible life" means). And we don't know what the chances are of life existing on a given habitable planet. So apart from the fact that all of the above probabilities may well be at or near zero, we're barely even capable of articulating the necessary questions, let alone searching for answers.