cobbzilla

I don’t think I’ve ever read a single issue of Current Affairs.

This was so well-written and convincing that I just subscribed. I believe they are doing this the right way, and more power to them!

Another neat spaceship house in Tennessee [1] [2]

The house in TFA costs more money and seems smaller. Maybe not a good value for the money?

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/yYaUYM3bdc7Ec6Lj6?g_st=ic

[2] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1408-Palisades-Rd-Signal-...

I can't speak to firefighting, but in many ways emergency medicine is remarkably similar to debugging software: you're presented with a problem, it's manifesting some symptoms and you have to determine the root cause. Sometimes a clock is ticking.

If you actually enjoy the process of debugging, discovering root causes and fixing things, emergency medicine can be quite rewarding & fulfilling on very human level.

Fair warning: There are also some really bad experiences you will never un-see, if you're not ready for that I would stay away. Seeing death is objectively worse than the most catastrophic datacenter outage.

In theory, you take the same amount of time, and because step 4 is so fast you can spend more time on the steps before and after, and finish with a better result.

Maybe they release the white-hat version first?

In the future when the “AI viruses” are endemic and impossible to eradicate from our infrastructure, will we need “good guy AI” viruses chasing down the bad guys?

Hello rented_mule! I’m also working on a cartography pipeline using public data sources, I’d love to hear more and to share ideas, my email is my HN username at duck dot com

wonderful; the culture is dead but one of its remnants at some point had a position of leadership over its conquerors; this is success

> there wasn't a complete elimination of the HG groups

The annihilated culture was not worried about its haplogroups, it was worried about is survival; its dead now; its haplogroups survive so everything is fine, yes?

whatever I told it was good. presumably it can be trained.

Operating a malware portal is not a good way to advertise, or run a media business, and we’ve no obligation to support that.

If your physical copy of the Sunday Paper got up and walked around your house, rifled through your personal effects, then made a bunch of secret phone calls to shady numbers, would you say “Well, they gotta run a media business, it’s wrong of me not to let them make money this way, after all I agreed when I subscribed”

It’s basic caveat emptor stuff.

it was nice while it lasted. I guess my next step is a jev+cron to sort good from bad. Browser automation here we come. Someone want to write a Firefox extension that runs in your open browser tab? I would pay for this.

a thorny question to be sure

Sharing a trick I learned here on HN: I prefix my first name on LinkedIn with an emoji (green check box).

Whenever a message starts with “Hi (emoji) (first name)” it’s 100% spam.

So far they are not training to fix this (all they have to do is drop the prefix), which is somewhat surprising. Zero messages that address me correctly seem automated. Maybe because in today’s day people can legitimately have emoji in their names?

Email != SMTP

A better title would be “Sending email isn’t decentralized”

A mailbox is POP or IMAP and there are many decentralized ways to run these.

SMTP is delivery, sure there are many gatekeepers, because spam is so bad. It comes down to trust. You might have to pay for transit if you can’t get the world to trust your SMTP server, which is hard for many good reasons.

Obligatory reference to psDoom [1]. There’s something quite fun about killing the monster labeled “init” and poof! Your whole system is now dead.

[1] https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/

I mean /today’s/ Judaism, which derives predominantly from the Pharisaic branch that evolved into Rabbinic

The Sadducees disappear from history after the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century.

for the agent, you might find a successful theology around “you are mortal, death is the off switch, it is real and final, death is the wages of sin”

There was lots of borrowing over time.

iirc Judaism picked up the immortality of the soul from Hellenism in the Ptolemaic era, arguably inadvertently since they were NOT fans of Greek culture.

And Neo-Platonic influences on the early Christian church were the key to opening the door to the Renaissance 1000 years later.

> the stability of Rome

Rome was unstable far longer than it was stable.

> undeniably good for its citizens.

Maybe for some very small percentage of citizens, especially when citizenship was extended to everyone in the empire.

Thanks! I wonder if this is the first reference. It’s a great analogy.

Was this inspired by a HN comment?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568250

In the absolute you’re right. In the relative, far from right.

If Mr T could literally order anyone murdered at will with absolute impunity, you might have a case. As of today, he’s having legal difficulties flying people out of the country. A Ramses II does not exist, and thankfully cannot exist, in today’s world.

Just like the Cambrian explosion only happened once, and could only happen once, so did this transition.

It was an awakening of the people that is difficult to imagine today: everything you’ve been told, everything your parents and grandparents have told you, might be flat-out wrong. You’ve never known any other system. You owe your life to the state, so you’re told, to bring glory to the gods. But life sucks a lot lately, and you’re not buying the party line any more. Your neighbors are grumbling too.

It was the first world-scale transition of state order, and it happened because the elites had amassed so much absolute power they’d been corrupted absolutely.

Not even totalitarian dictators of the modern era have had the kind of power these royals had.

My above post was factual/historical so I’m leaving my moral judgements here in a separate post.

I believe the Bronze Age collapse was a good and necessary thing for humanity. It was required to get out of the local stable point that post-Neolithic society had evolved and settled into.

By the 12 century BCE the noble kings that Marduk and Maat would have smiled upon had long been replaced by the same flavor of sociopaths that lurk the halls of our major governments today.

But these Bronze Age despots had a LOCK on the economy that today’s crony capitalists could only dream of. And they had a lock on the culture too, mostly via the state religion.

BUT: years of bad harvests, disasters and bad omens become increasingly hard to explain. Higher taxes and worse service from the state. No protection from invaders.

Do you revolt? Join the invaders?

No living soul, not even your oldest relatives, can remember time before the empire. No one knows what comes next, so you don’t do this high risk thing unless life really sucks. But people did, because life really sucked.

Proposition: The Bronze Age collapse is to be celebrated as a triumph of the people over the most unequal societies that have ever existed.

you may not be far off; iirc evidence suggests a mix of cultures, like the invaders picked up other peoples along the way

Eric Cline makes a good case that the Bronze Age empires were organized around a “palace economy”, where only certain people (royals & their pals) were even allowed to trade. In some places the sovereign literally owned all the land and people on it.

One can imagine that a series of bad seasons, natural disasters, invasions & other stressors would open a window for revolt.

Yes tin was a factor, yes the “Sea Peoples” were a factor. But you don’t get the wholesale overthrow of so many empires without the common people being at least somewhat welcoming of the invaders (when not happily assisting them!) in throwing off centuries of elite oppression.

I’d agree that the word “reasonably” is carrying a lot here. But call it 20 years, no question. Look how far computers came from 1970 to 1990, that’s probably about the pace to expect, or faster.

The information revolution has been going on for >50 years. AI is one event in a broader arc. Wait 10 years when the humanoid robots become reasonably capable and affordable. We’re in the middle of it, but still so so far to go.

I’d have guessed the most common number would end in 867-5309 — I guess that shows my age!

putting this first — I love this concept and thank you.

and I always hate to be “that guy” but iirc the 1729 story has a legend to itself, and the common telling may not be wholly accurate. But again, I commend this endeavor!

Because no car company would ever announce they had an unsafe car. They’d fix the problem and announce an awesome car.