tolciho

Oklo, Gabon appears to have run a nuclear reactor about 1.7 billion years ago, though whether you can get a natural nuclear explosion on some chunk of rock somewhere might be difficult to tell.

25% might be low for the "better dead than red" crowd, given the lasting and widespread popularity of communism in the worker's paradise that is America.

And that slop increases the range of things bikesheddable, like having free kerosene and matches available at an Arson Anonymous meeting.

LLM increase the range of things bikesheddable, so some folks will try to have a LLM design a nuclear reactor and manage the coffee budget in addition to the traditional bikeshed design complications. Whether this is an improvement or more engines of what passes for civilization catching on fire, well…

AppleScript "English" was designed to be intuitive and easy to understand (or so claimed various manuals), but boy howdy did I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what "English" it did accept.

One might wonder whether the Late Bronze Age collapse had similar (copper, finance, tin) reasons for going the way it did.

The profit urge was already made fun of in a recent novel.

  “And what does the author mean to do?” said Don Quixote.

  “What?” replied Samson; “why, as soon as he has found the history which
  he is now searching for with extraordinary diligence, he will at once
  give it to the press, moved more by the profit that may accrue to him
  from doing so than by any thought of praise.”

  Whereat Sancho observed, “The author looks for money and profit, does he?
  It will be a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only hurry, hurry,
  with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works done in a hurry are
  never finished as perfectly as they ought to be.

  printf 'silent data loss' | while read l; do printf '%s\n' "$l"; done

though at the point I need to write

  while IFS= read -r line || [ -n "$line" ]; do
    printf '%s\n' "$line"
  done

I'll use a different language.

  for name in `ls`; do echo "$name"; done

is an unportable and expensive way to write

  for name in *; do printf '%s\n' "$name"; done

but you could also just

  printf '%s\n' *

Months to years without a reboot sounds like a pretty big gamble as to whether the hardware still boots, or not. More frequent reboots tend to catch "the hardware has soured" (and how would you know?) issues sooner, like maybe the BIOS decides to come up with the clock set four years into the future and then time sync can fail and then everything fails. The prior example was strictly hypothetical, of course no real system would ever do that.

The "big old plane" was from the B team at Boeing, everyone with money or ambition or plain common sense then had put their chips on supersonics, which guzzle even more fuel in addition to the Operation Bongo II problem.

Try the smolnet, which would be the web before it went all "the 'Akira' stadium scene", or gopher, or gemini (no, not the google twaddle).

Note the use of 'may'; the details of the car-hell vary. Perhaps the I-90 pollution instead spills into the lake and then bioaccumultes into larger organisms, Bon Appétit! My anecdote was a bit southwesterly of the I-5 bridge where there was, besides the horrific noise pollution, definitely a greyish black soot to clean off everything. A fine result of rolling a natural one and automatically failing the skill check for "copy the autobahn", probably.

As to why some beings need to be whisked hither and yon with such haste, and thus spend quite a bit of time (and energy) trying to be somewhere, anywhere else, well, are they hungry ghosts? Or maybe they min/maxed for wizard and ended up with only three points in wisdom?

(The RFC also allows for (recursive (comments, so there's probably a middle ground between insanely overengineered specifications and a )))regex( someone found on a PHP forum somewhere (and yes this post is a valid email address (assuming there is a local regex account (or alias)))

> have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.

Should you live near one of those big noisy "freeway" things you may note the little black particles over everything in the surroundings but nobody likes to tear down the interstate.