primitur

I love my electric moped. Riding it around my European big-city, it just feels so comforting. Its so quiet, it doesn't scare ducks.

Scooters are taking over - Vienna is a green city that has had time to refine its transportation culture over a millenia. Parts of it were built for horses.

When I'm on my electric moped, I ride it like a horse. No need to over-do it and speed, or whatever, just pace along at a trot. There's a harmonic spot where the curves and corners of the city suddenly become super-fluid, and I even get all the green lights .. I'm pretty sure its because the physical geometry is designed for horses, and the electric moped drive train can approximate that.

Anyway, I can't wait until all the cars disappear. Europe is going to be even more beautiful.

When the state of the world becomes untenable, the best thing to do is create a new one, right on top.

There is a part of the Internet where ads cannot/have not gone. Just use that. (Or the next one..)

    while sleep 900 ; do .. done

true not required. sleep is true unless interrupted.

> all their libraries, all their dependencies?

Well, you see ... I happen to think that you can use a lot of tools to cover your ass, and .. the fact that this one slipped in is as much a comment on the crud that is promulgating the wild and woolly Node/JS ecosystem as it is anything else. In point of fact, this kind of bollocks is why I eschew Node/JS and use other things [1], instead.

I do believe there are tools and ecosystems which make this sort of thing less likely. I can't recall a Linux easter egg .. nor a Golang one ..

>Should people write their own web servers instead? Their own frameworks? Their own operating systems?

One should at least, audit. As much as possible. It doesn't take much for a competent dev to 'grep -ir "easter egg $CODEBLASE' or, whatever .. not that its an expectation.

But yeah, if you have to have government-level 5-nines on all services, then I would say - fair play. The responsibility for an audit of such things should definitely have been in the requirements. I've seen such expectations for lesser projects, personally, where .. indeed .. code audit and ownership were tightly .. and properly .. managed.

[1] - I don't know for sure, but I think its harder to slip in such an easter egg on a production golang system. I guess I'll tune into that if/when it happens/has happened..

Actually this 'very different' aspect is a broken piece of modern development - its a bug, not a feature. There are methodologies which could have caught this entire stack issue and nobody would have lost their jobs - its just that the ethics of "developer who has control over everything else, or else" versus that of "proper operations and support engineering management (i.e. fire burns upwards..)" are out of skew.

We've been putting up with live fixes and direct "developer"-"production system" style methodologies for a long time; only ethically. It just happens to be 'accepted practice' to fold some gargantuan code-base into ones own environment, without a line-for-line proper review. "Its impossible", say the bean counters. "Who would pay for that?"

Technically there is no good reason for the easter egg to have occurred, had someone done a proper code-review, observed full test reports, respected code-coverage rules and principles, and so on.

The easter egg proved that someone wasn't doing their job.

The physical conditions of the city are a manifestation of the destitution of its people. I've lived in many cities around the world that were utterly poor - yet, the people kept the streets clean. Things were orderly and maintained.

I firmly believe its a matter of the principles of the society. In a progressive, wealthy nation such as exist in Europe, recycling is a thing. People don't want to live in trash - they use it for energy, or recycle it as much as possible. Those who sort trash, promote a cleaner eco-system .. those who eschew the waste anyway, as 'responsible consumers', also help a great deal. These are cultural phenomenon you don't find widely promoted in various civic contingencies around the western world; corruption persists in environments which support its ill-gained prosperity.

In Europe, at least, we can find as many good as bad examples of this. I think its clear, the same cannot be said of other of the western nations ..

> I wonder if they could make a direct air-powered vibrator so that one doesn't have to torture their lips.

This fact is, imho, a motivating principle behind the genesis of various synthesizer designs and concepts. We synthesists wish we could do this stuff with our mouths, but the LFO's and the VCO's and the various and sundry other oscillating things represented in the electronic musical instrument world, can't blow a farts worth in comparison to a good trumpeter...

ATDT42

(Coz 42 is Gods phone #, duh...)

I wonder if there is anything unique about this that might make it interesting to use in a sampler or a synthesizer or something .. maybe some random noises that could be generated by stroking the core, or some such things ..

>you don't go from relatively simple cave paintings to insanely complex languages, forms of government and far-fetched empires just by snapping a finger twice

See, thats the fascinating thing about crackpot archeology/anthropology/sociology/etc. Eventually, its just a bunch of words - an ontology - with which to describe a complex system.

The idea that the root nature of the language is expressible in human-ideal objects, and that this ontology can persist across 10's of thousands of years of human activity (mostly destructive) as a cultural artifact with a message .. yes, this is difficult to conceive. Or, is it really?

"Far-fetched empires": literally what it means to consider what such an empire, were it in existence 65,000 years ago, would have looked like. Like, literally, its a far-fetched idea to look at a piece of dirt, and then paint a deep picture of what happened to it.

Without such imagination, speculation doesn't begin, and without speculation followed up by careful inspection, the relics would still just be out there, being ignored.

This erosion of responsibility over time is some sort of back force from a wave of generational disillusionment.

We don't want to go back to doing email like our parents did (except we do) so its time to use the cool new shit. Ah, Big Vendor with cool new shit, is cool with the kids. In slips the mickey, and the rest is devolutionary disco.

We really do need to return to using email properly. All these social networks were already there; we just forgot how to build them ourselves, and a return to using email for ones contacts, strictly, can be an immensely rewarding experience, or at least a lot of anecdotal evidence seems to support this theory.

Simply learning how to send and use email, the bcc:, the cc:, the x-headers:, etc. If we'd put a bit of effort into this, we'd have a fallback replacement for the behemoth maw, threatening to swallow us all in its dark abyss.

Tight game-loops can be a battery drain, and especially if there are local 'go-lang' things running, inevitably, alongside the SDL bridge. I'd put it in as a clever and educated 'packages may damage your battery' fair-warning, myself.

Its turtles, all the way down. All users of computers must deal with the abstraction handles and layers for which they are comfortable - and which produce results. Not just data-science people. Pretty much a user maxim.