Before any of us even imagined we'd have a computer or a course on it, we "programmed" in text books. The language was mostly GOTO, but might even have the occasional conditional as in, "If you like cheese turn to page 56 otherwise 103". Typical applications were insulting the teacher's appearance, as in "for a picture of the teacher, turn to page 45", where there was a picture of a gorilla.

This was of course, not permitted which made us low-key black hat "hackers". In private school the penalty for this was far too steep. I don't know if public school kids learned how to diagram sentences or not; but we did. I later realized we had been taught parse trees by another name.

Yes, BASIC was my first programming language on an actual computer.

And if you haven't experienced these temperatures you need to understand that those not accustomed to them can't do much of anything when it's that hot. I've experienced close to the higher of these two temperatures in Death Valley, and mild exertion was not sustainable. It was life threatening without an air conditioned car to get back to. The lower of these comps to being in my house when there was no air conditioning. What happens after a while is you're just consumed with keeping cool and can't focus on much else. A spray bottle and a fan helps a little, but if you're not wet and the air isn't dry, then there's a point where the fan stops acting to cool you and actually heats you up--it's a low-grade convection oven effect.

Motorcyclists are aware of this, they even have a chart out there somewhere that shows the break-even point where the wind stops cooling you and starts baking... but dang, all the links that I could find easily are badly enshittified. Just trust me, bikers will feel slightly *warmer* when riding at highway speeds in temperatures above 95F.

Some people can actually acclimate to these temperatures. They generally know who they are. The body is an amazing thing, but I'm sure even those people have their limits.

Nope. Fleet operators can safely maintain a bank of charged batteries and swap them. Five minute operation or less with a properly designed truck. That's based on commonly used technology that exists, with peak storage batteries on the grid already. You can find plenty of qualified technicians to deal with all that. It fits in neatly with various industrial operations that might have other reasons to maintain a bank of batteries in order to smooth out their power consumption and get better electric rates.

H2 can sort of do all that--but needs high pressure tanks, and a way to convert to/from electricity but the real nail in the coffin is finding qualified technicians, and safely and quickly fueling the vehicles.

Hydrogen is a boondoggle pretty much every where. It made sense in some space craft, that's about it.

Turns out their guitar cases had laptops in them too, and they can code twice as good as you!

I've heard there are more slaves now than at any time in history. Of course that might not be true if normalized to a percentage of the work force; but the mere fact that it even still exists is of course awful. We've sanitized slavery by re-naming it as "convict labor" or in this case pushing it overseas and wrapping it in layers to disclaim responsibility.

Task: Recite as many digits of pi as you can.

Me: 3.14159. I know there are ways to get more.

AI: Arbitrary number of digits subject only to some hard-coded constraint, as well as able to tell you about all the algorithms for approximating pi along with their strengths and weaknesses, then run the algorithms for you.

Let's see 29 Watts do that.

Oh hell no. Out on the open road, cruise control is a godsend. It's not that I can't maintain speed without it. In fact, on hills I'm better than cruise control. It's about preventing soreness and fatigue. It doesn't distract. Quite the opposite. With auto-throttle you can focus more on other things like critters that might jump out at you. Hit the brake and it's back to normal driving. I'm not a big fan of most self-driving tech; but you can have my cruise control when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.

The structure is the easy part. It's a solved problem. These printed homes will be objectively worse to the extent it might not be as easy to maintain them as other pre-fabricated housing, which has existed for decades and is arguably superior to site built--every pre-fab experiences the equivalent of a massive earthquake during transit, so their kind of built for that except for the mating lines; but I digress.

Siting is the hard part. Land cost. Foundation. Hook-ups. That's where it gets really expensive and difficult. Best case scenario for low-cost is flat land in an unpopular rural area with under-subscribed water, sewer, and power; but that only happens because nobody wants to live there in the first place.

A million times this! Not once in the past 20 years have I ever pointed the finger at an image as the reason why a page is bogged down. Since I installed script blocking, slow sites are almost always showing an attempt to access *dozens* of 3rd party domains that I restrict by default. This site? It's only using 2 other domains, fsdn and cloudfront. Slashdot loads just as fast as it always has.

Dark Star was aired on late night TV several times in my teens. We're talking late, late night--after SNL crazy late. Something about being a teenager that makes you want to be up at that hour. I probably never saw the whole thing in one sitting, but I know I got to the end once. I admired the gritty, dirty look of it all vs. the unrealistic cleanliness of 2001 or Star Trek. When the Soviet space station Mir began to age and grow mold I was immediately reminded of it. A space station that was behaving like a rundown trailer meant we had arrived in the world of sci fi--the world predicted by Dark Star.

The original "things I won't work with" said there was actually a Chinese supplier listed, and he poked fun of them for listing a 1kg container because as far as he knew that much had never been created. That was not the cause, but the idea that somebody might order it and they would actually attempt fulfillment made me think of this.

This was out there on other sites last week. I read the bill, it's pretty short. My first thought was "What about crop dusting?" but if you RTFB, you see that you have to be releasing those chemicals for the *purpose* of affecting the things on the list. So. It doesn't ban contrails, crop dusting, or other normal activities. It's still silly, it's just that it seems to cover most of what people might see as unintended consequences--except possibly cloud seeding, which isn't very common anyway.

I just had a word with "fuck", and he said "kill" and its various forms are not in the club.

This is an annoying trend, and the fact that the summary botched the number of asterisks makes it extra annoying. It seems like it started with r*pe, which made me wonder if somebody got a rope and killed themselves. (Oh no! He said killed). IIRC, rape may have been in our elementary school dictionary; kill definitely was. THESE ARE NOT DIRTY WORDS.

Is... is it official? Did Millenials ruin swearing, or it it more of a GenZ thing?

Endless real growth is unsustainable, but nominal monetary "growth" can be infinite. You just keep sending out stimulus checks, and as long as you do it in response to crises that would otherwise be deflationary it won't cause the hyper-inflation that so many gold bugs (and later bitcoiners) have forecast. Instead, we'll slow-walk towards a mixed UBI/capitalist economy, maybe even a Star Trek economy or as some have joked, "Full Luxury Gay Space Communism". It has to be managed properly though, and that's my big concern. Over-shooting on the dole-outs can definitely cause hyper-inflation. Idle minds can definitely be led by demagogues and sink us in to some kind of left or right extremism. Economists and politicians with vision have to come together and handle this with something other than ideology driven by Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, or Marx.

Very future-proof. Properly cared for, it may be possible to play vinyl centuries from now. There are already Edison cylinders over 100 years old, and the composition of modern records may be even more stable.

The CD-format hasn't changed in decades, but it's still wrapped up with some fairly advanced technology that's much more easily lost if society breaks down. CDs have only been subject to simulated aging tests at best, no real world experience with it as a century-long archiving format.