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  I still remember the day in 1976 when Gary Kildall typed in "dir" to an "A>" prompt on his hazeltine green-screen character display to show me a directory listing on his 8080-based, eight-bit computer running the first release of CP/M, the first real microcomputer operating system (that Gary wrote). He gave me a shy but proud look and asked what I thought. It seemed miraculous to me, and I was hooked. Anyway, I just tried to rename a file on my Windows 10 PC and midway th...

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  Those who seek high office are generally the worst possible choice for the job. I continue to fail to discover a reason why we should not elect our senators, representatives, and presidents via the process known as Sortition, whereby the winners (losers?) are chosen by lot. All citizens are eligible. Kinda how we choose jurors in the USA. PS. and voters should be paid a thousand bucks each time they vote.

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  Means testing is slower, more expensive, more demeaning, and less effective than just giving stuff to everybody who asks for it.

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  RE: https://writing.exchange/@golgaloth/116988516977129530 Well, that explains a lot.

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  Where's the beef? #TextsFromDogs #HashTagGames

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  Jimothy for President!

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  Look at this way: Global Climate Change is just god's way of turning the human race off and then back on again.

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  Long Term Parking. French sculpture.

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  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@evacide/116829265237530324 Not only are managers colossally stupid, but they are colossally gullible. I mean, Ford is a huge company with vast resources and yet they fell into a shithole of their own making.

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  Just because someone is terrified of monsters under their bed, it doesn't mean that I have to take anti-monster action in my own bedroom.

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  At bottom, the American Economy was based on the simple notion that water, trees, minerals, ore, fuel, food, arable soil, and the air we breathe are all endless and free and, by simply paying the federal government for the land these resources are on, one can cut, dig, mine, smelt, or take all one wants and resell them for personal profit. In the South they enslaved people, too, so even the labor was free. Selling land is basically also how the United States of America raised the start-up capit...

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  The more I learn about "AI" as an aid to software development the more I think it's the field that "AI" can and will help more than any other. But I have grave doubts that we will ever get to that point. As I've said for years, nobody really understands how to create software, and software companies understand it worse than anyone. Everything I read about "AI" tells me this is still true.

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  It's kinda fun watching trump slowly recognizing how he has painted himself into a corner and he's burned all of his bridges. It's also kinda scary knowing that trump is desperate, has the nuclear codes, and is a nihilist.

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  Today, the Israelis are doing to the tribes of the Middle East what the United States did to the indigenous tribes of the North American continent 300 years ago.

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  Is that Jeff Epstein he's raising from the dead?

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  I certainly hope that the White House Correspondents Association has learned their lesson and never invites trump to another of their gatherings, regardless of where it's held.

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  Here's a screenshot of Google maps showing a small portion of downtown Shanghai. You can clearly see that the digital overlay of roads does not line up with the image of the actual roads. I think China dithers the GPS signal as a defensive maneuver to protect sensitive targets. Does anyone know more about this?

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  "The sky is falling like a Sock of cocaine in the Ministry of information" --Black Mission Goggles, by Man Man

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  To all those Americans who say "This isn't who we are" all I can say is holy shit read some fucking history. This is exactly who we are. Let's--for once--try to be something better.

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  No matter where you turn you learn the most basic lesson of life: The soft skills are the hard part.

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  TIL every one of the 19 Spanish-speaking countries has a different word for popcorn.

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  Those things that JDVance says? You know, the words that come out of his mouth? They have no meaning. They are not attached to reality. He doesn't believe them. It's just a script he bleats out depending on what reaction he wants. He's paid to do it. He believes nothing. He knows nothing. He cares not at all.

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  FOSS is communism. Not the communism of the Soviet Union or Red China, but the communism of your family, where each family member contributes what they can, and each member takes only what they need.

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  I'd like to see a US Constitution that says explicitly that it's not just for "All men" but for all people, even those who don't live here. I wouldn't argue if you wanted to include trees, too.

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  A society is made up of laws and generally agreed upon assertions and conventions. A constitution is a formalization of those things. We enshrine and worship our Constitution as if it were a perfect document, but it is far from that. Enshrining implies stasis. A good constitution is one that changes over time to better suit the circumstances. One of the great flaws of the current USA Constitution is that its mechanism for change, Article V, is weak to the point of dysfunction. Therefore, the...

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  RE: https://mstdn.ca/@SaanichGuy/116320387879408366 USA TAKE NOTE!

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  I'm halfway through Jill Lepore's latest book, "We the People." It's a history of the US Constitution and it's excellent. It also makes me want to revise, replace, and amend our Constitution (the way the authors fully intended). My top 3 changes: 1. Direct election of President (eliminate Electoral College). 2. Representative apportionment for Senate (number of senators proportional to state population). 3. Eliminate Judicial Review (don&amp...

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  I just posted this sign in my workshop. It's the one I carried last Saturday in the No Kings demonstration.

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  "The practical consequences of an unexamined inner life at scale are not theoretical. The social media platforms built by people who believed behavioral data was a reliable substitute for understanding human psychology produced a decade of engagement metrics while user wellbeing declined and our entire social order decayed. The engineers who built these systems weren't malicious; they were optimizing for things they could measure, because they'd implicitly accepted the v...