Digital Mark

Even original Nolan Bushnell’s Atari, was bought by Warner Brothers, then (mostly) bought by Jack Tramiel after leaving Commodore. So it’s not an unbroken line. Infogrames Fr’s new management has quit with the NFT nonsense, and is making Atari-related stuff that isn’t awful.

Also, Courtney Love is 10x the musician Kurt ever was, listen to any track on America’s Sweetheart and you’ll break your heart. It’s better that she’s free.

The average quality of music in the world doubled the day Kurt Cobain solved his headache problem. Grunge was a disease caused by not changing your clothes, and using too much heroin instead of learning to play instruments and sing.

And, I’m peak GenX and a Seattleite.

“What was that noise?”

Most languages respond something like “it’s nothing”, de nada. English is a little weird saying “welcome”.

It’s 1984.

Repo Man. If they don’t like it, I don’t want them around.

Multiple of your friends have cancer, died of cancer, or of other illnesses. But mostly the cancer.

You wonder if your bowels are OK. They are not.

You made an obviously incorrect claim, and now you’ve doubled down on “nobody should have a phone or computer”, which is… no longer in reality. Thanks for not having a productive conversation.

PLONK

If you can’t afford an iPhone, that’s tough, but I live in the US where it’s 56%, and around the world it’s 28%, which is not “doesn’t exist”. And in any case Signal exists for the others. Yes, if you use a freecycled GNU/Linux phone with not-sold-in-Shenzhen wireless chipset not supported by any carrier so it has to be hardwired to ethernet, you’ll have a harder time.

And if you do try to do everything at once, you fail at everything. Which is what happened after Google EEE’d and crushed XMPP, it’s unsupported in full by anyone. There’s no money in open source networking, it’s near impossible to fund the people who work on critical infrastructure, let alone new toys.

Meanwhile, there’s a system that’s been working for 35 years.

I have two.

Scheme. It’s a fantastic language, you can cleanly switch from functional, procedural, or weird time machines (macros & continuations) solutions to any problem. Most Schemes (esp. Chez, CHICKEN, Gambit, Gerbil) compile to very fast binaries, close enough to C even with dynamic typing and garbage collection. C FFI depends on impl, but usually it’s pretty simple; in CHICKEN you can just write inline C code. SRFI vary from essential libraries to angels-on-pinheads nonsense, but there’s something to pick from.

Down side is the fractured, infighting community. R6RS was a practical batteries-included spec, which pissed off the teaching-only fans, so they made an inferior R7RS, and now committees are trying to make R7RS-large which is just bad R6RS. But if you pick one, and mostly stick to the spec language, it’s not a problem for the developer.

BASIC. I know, ridiculous, right? And I mean line-numbered, Atari or TRS-80 BASIC. But there was never a better language for teaching programming, or for banging out a small interactive program. Turn on any 8-bit computer (or start an emulator), it prompts READY, and you can write something small & interesting. Your modern 64-bit giant machine is not READY.

Of course not. I am the guy in long coat, hoodie or toque, big black boots, and face mask.

Crime rates have dropped massively, you’re being driven into a panic by pro-police, racist media manipulation.

You don’t have to solve every problem in a single application. If you need privacy, use iMessage or Signal.

Public chat is by definition not secure, anyone can be sitting in the room logging, so it’s not that essential as long as client-server uses TLS. Modern IRC does have SDCC chat, but not all clients will use it, so stick to secure messengers.

Don’t use either, they’re unreliable services and not enough people use them. Stick to IRC.

https://xkcd.com/1782/

There’s about 8 billion Humans, and about half of them suck more than any friendly domestic animal. The worst? I’d create an emergency.

Governmental research. There was Project Blue Book, as I mentioned, which was inconclusive and then ended.

Is there other intelligent alien life in our Galaxy? Probably. Given how fast life formed on Earth, there must be millions of other life-bearing planets, and intelligence can’t be that rare, but it might be short-lived.

Are there UFO sightings? Yes, people do see unidentified flying objects. Some of them can be explained, some cannot.

Are the UFOs aliens? I don’t know, I’m a “curious agnostic” on the subject.

There’s a LOT of UFO sightings, and evidence from good observers, including US Navy aviators. The US Air Force continues not to cooperate, and officially denies any sightings exist. The very enthusiastic refusal to look at evidence, aside from Project Blue Book, is suspicious.

It’s technically plausible that someone within 50-ish light years of Earth could have heard our radio, sent a ship here, and use drones or manned ships to observe us without interacting. There could also be many other explanations.

We don’t know, and until the last couple years there was no effort to investigate.

Reset, New Game.

I recognized the twist at a certain conversation early in the movie. It’s not really hidden, or at least not well.

Bruce Bethke, the guy who actually invented cyberpunk and wrote the story Cyberpunk, wrote a book Head Crash. In which the VR hotsuit includes a “ProctoProd®” for bass. Bruce’s predictions have turned out more accurate than anyone else’s.