usrn

I have a blog I generate from org mode files. I think it's better for my mental health than comments like these.

I did everything under my real name up until last year, this is why I stopped. I remember being told over and over again never to use my real name on the internet. I wonder why we stopped telling people that, it was a good idea.

I know someone who got hired recently to get PDP11 software running in an emulator to control an industrial process.

People keep telling me "wasps are great because they eat the spiders" and I really don't get it. I'll take spiders over wasps any day of the week.

I really love the greenfield situations where you're building stuff up from scratch and have minimal APIs to deal with so you can just keep everything in your head and plow through writing tons of code. No one pays you to do that though.

There's a ton of carbon in the Martian atmosphere. It sounds like a great place for an algae farm (which is where terrestrial oil came from.)

"Trust the science" when there isn't any public study or experiment really means "trust the conjecture" but that's not so great for PR.

You will never destroy ethnic identity in humans because once you manage it for one or two races, one of the many remaining will just over run them. It's not just a waste of energy to try, it's actively harmful and often causes reactionary movements like this when people realize what the end of it is.

Software rots man. It can be really hard to run some open source software from the 80s and 90s. This is actually one of the big arguments for Open Source: Access to the software is way less interesting than the support/community/ecosystem around it; there's no reason not to open source your software and not doing it actually harms the users.

I can taste the different kinds but I honestly don't mind the Folgers bagged coffee. It's nice because I can just use my normal electric kettle and there's hardly any mess.

Solar panels are pretty hard on the environment and (in places with poor regulation) the people manufacturing them but once you've got them set up they're pretty fantastic (provided you don't accidentally smash them like I did my first system.) You have truly independent energy this way. Also there are consumer products like the jackery that make moving power easy for normal people so It's not hard to share with your neighbors when they need some extra too.

A lot if you're posting from your Apple ][. Users should really be signing their posts themselves anyway, not relying on authentication and vouching from a third party. Session authentication is kind of silly for blog posting IMO. The problem is that message authentication still isn't common so people just use session authentication since it's easy and it's what we have.

I'm blaming blindly siding with environmentalists (especially corporate funded ones) without reasoning through the consequences. If you want to call those hippies than yeah I'm blaming the hippies, this is a direct consequence of their actions no matter what you call them. The exact same thing is going to keep happening if they don't change their behavior.

China is

1) Not self sufficient, they have to import food from the US

2) Burning nearly a million more cubic feet of coal per capita than the US does (and they have way more people, so that means they're really burning far far more coal)

Honestly I'm not sure how you thought that made any sense.

EDIT: (out of comment quota)

>China also installs more renewables than anyone else

I'm sure that's great for the companies producing those, I'm not convinced that will lead to them burning less coal (although their coming demographic collapse almost certainly will.) Germany was in a pretty similar situation too and the current situation is the consequence.

Part of the reason Germany is still stuck on fossil fuels was the ultimatums of the environmentalists that killed their nuclear power. IMO if they really care about the environment they need to chill out so people can work out how to transition. Hard rules like this will first result in desperation which causes people to make sub-optimal choices like you're seeing now and eventually economic collapse which will absolutely destroy the environment (think of all the messes the USSR made when it fell apart.) Whatever regime replaces the one that causes this probably will care a lot less about the environment too.