Sadly, you can see the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic from space. Dominican Republic is the side with vegetation.

Cloth maps are the thing I miss the most.

Or the “DRM” of the time, copy protection where the game would either stop and ask you for the Xth word of the Yth paragraph on page Z of the manual. Or the code wheels.

I wish I’d done that more. It was so much fun the few times I did it.

It doesn’t have to be your last.

There are pros and cons, obviously. Getting a game that was extremely well tested and nearly bug free on day 1 was great. But, not all games were that well tested, and many had gameplay-breaking bugs that you just had to live with because there was no way to update them.

Wonderful. DRAM and NAND flash companies are a cartel and are able to make their prices absurd by cutting supply when demand is high.

they’re reducing production in places.

Really? Where have you seen that reported?

So, maybe this will result in the companies that make SSDs ramping up production. Maybe once the bubble bursts there will be a huge glut of SSDs and so they’ll be cheap.

C’mon bubble, do your popping thing.

I hope datacenters are ordering pallets of 8 TB SSDs and are instead getting pallets with bricks on them.

I’m aware that there are community features on Steam, and some people must use them. There are stickers, profile pages, trading cards, and all kind of other things that I mostly ignore, but that other people must be using. But, I don’t think I’d ever call myself a member of the Steam community.

On the other hand, there are communities for games on Steam. The game-related forums and mod workshops are essential parts of some of the Steam games I play. I don’t post much in the forums, but I definitely use guides that other people post there.

What I think makes Steam work is:

• fair and honest prices, often with sales and discounts
• any DRM they use is something that normal users don’t notice – you really notice the difference when you end up with a Ubisoft game, even if it’s on Steam.
• updates that just work, so the next time you start the game it’s a new version and you don’t have to do anything
• a store that seems designed to sell you games you’ll actually enjoy playing, not one that pushes you to buy things that will make them the most money
• a client that makes it easy to play games with your friends, using a consistent interface, if you choose to do that. If not, they don’t try to push you to do things with friends.
• a decent review system that they’ve mostly managed to prevent people from gaming

I guess some of those, like playing games with friends, or even reviews could be seen as community features. But, I don’t feel like I’m “part of the steam community” when I play games with friends. We just happen to be two people playing a game using the same launcher. As for reviews, I don’t trust Steam reviews more than say Metacritic or Rock Paper Shotgun. I actually trust the “community” less than a good reviewer. There are admittedly some features of the Steam reviews that are useful, like saying how many hours someone has put into a game next to their review. I just mostly use the Steam reviews as a way to avoid buying something that’s a complete stinker because it looks interesting and is on sale.

Often the loser of a competition knows more about the competition than someone who wasn’t involved in the competition.

But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll be honest about why they lost, maybe not even honest with themselves.

They don’t support sending messages over a serial / USB / network connection to say “battery is almost dead, shut down cleanly while you can” right? As far as I can tell, that’s the one key feature that a UPS has that a portable battery doesn’t.

I took a look the other day and was amazed at how little UPSes have improved in the last few decades vs. everything else battery-related.

At this point, I’d expect a consumer-grade UPS to have something like a Raspberry PI attached, and run a web server. I’d expect it to not just have a serial port for signaling, but to be able to run custom BASH scripts to send messages out to any attached device warning it about being on battery and keeping it up to date on the battery status.

Some form of “AI” will always be around. It has been around nearly as long as we’ve had computers. We’ve even had AI chatbots since 1966.

But, the dot com bubble is a bad comparison. If you look at a graph of Internet users over time you can barely even see the dot com crash. The Internet was a massively useful phenomenon and more and more people kept using it. The dot com crash was basically an overestimation of how quickly people were going to adopt it combined with a massive drop in the value of Internet-based ads.

What’s much more likely with AI is another AI Winter where a few things stick around, but mostly AI goes back on the back burner for a few more decades.

No, read the executive order:

the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

If either parent was a citizen, the children are citizens. Trump was a citizen so his kids are citizens under his new interpretation.

It’s so incredibly stupid.

I don’t think it’s an “obsession with cars” or that people are “ignoring” electrified rail.

The problem is that there are things that are in your direct control, like buying a car and using the roads which exist. Then, there are things outside your direct control, like trying to get your government to install electrified rail. Even if you have a really responsive government that isn’t captured by special interests, getting rail built and up and running can take a decade. And, if you need to get from A to B, you can’t wait for a decade. Even if you’re really pro-rail during that decade you still need to travel, so you’re likely to be forced into getting a car. Once you have a car, then rail might become less of a priority because you are now a car user. Maybe eventually you’ll still want to use the rail system, but for now you have a car, so your priorities are still going to include car priorities.

This all changes if you live somewhere where there’s already great rail service. In that case, you might already have rail available when you move somewhere and all you need to do is encourage your local government to keep funding rail and not subsidizing cars. At that point, the car driver demographic is small and easy to ignore.

The problem is in switching from one system to the other. You need a government that is going to weather the complaints from drivers for years while the rail infrastructure is being put in place until you get to a point where drivers can start selling their cars and switching to rail. That’s really hard to do though, because going from poor rail infrastructure to good rail infrastructure can take a decade, and politicians often have terms lasting only 4 years or so. That means that they have to take on the expense and pain of starting a rail project and then facing an election long before the system is up and running. It’s actually surprising how many politicians are willing to do that, given that it’s so hard on their political careers. It’s unsurprising that most of them don’t want to do it because it means getting re-elected is much more difficult than if they just stick with the status quo.

Meanwhile, the special interests like car companies, car dealerships, gas stations, etc. are all going to be lobbying against any rail projects. In North America it’s even harder because car companies are local, whereas the companies that make trains are mostly European. So, the car-related lobby can talk all about the impact on local jobs, whereas the rail lobby has to deal with the jobs mostly being in Europe. Even without that, it’s hard to change things because of the issue of diffuse costs and concentrated interests. Hundreds of thousands of commuters might benefit from a rail system, but it’s probably not their #1 priority, it’s something they care about, but at best it’s #4 or #5. Meanwhile for car companies, etc. it’s a top priority. While you might not want to go to every city council meeting where this is being discussed. It’s almost certain that the auto lobby will ensure their voice is heard because it’s at the top of their list.

In the end, it’s a lot more complex than just people being obsessed with cars, or ignoring light rail.

Her plane may not have been off-the-shelf, but I’m sure she was heavily involved in any modification to it. She was a pilot, that was her concern.

She probably didn’t consider herself a radio operator, and didn’t realize how critical it was to fully understand the radio gear.

My guess is that at that point in time, being a radio operator would be like someone who knew something like 3d printing in great detail today. It was a niche skill that involved a lot of obscure knowledge. If someone doesn’t know something like 3d printing, someone can set it all up for them and then say “ok, when you’re ready, hit this button, when you’re done, do this” and they can use it. I assume that’s what happened with the radio setup. Someone with expertise set it up, and it might have worked, but she didn’t know enough to troubleshoot it when it went wrong.

Gemini is the twins, Janus is the Roman two-faced god.

If Claude Code was (as Anthropic claims) 100% written by Claude, then it’s not copyrightable. It’s not open sourced, it’s public domain.