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Related: In FreeBSD we used to talk often about the Wemm Field. Peter Wemm was one of the early FreeBSD developers and responsible for most of the early project server cluster, and hardware had a phenomenal habit of breaking in his vicinity. One notable story I heard involved transporting servers between data centers and hitting a Christmas tree in the middle of a highway... in March.

To be fair, a hypergolic blanket would still keep you warm. Potentially for the rest of your life!

do not fold the hypergolic blanket!

This is worth reading for the line "For some reason difficult to divine the radioactive ATM card did not catch on." alone.

Oh, I don't know. I quite like radioactivity. My Dad (RAF bomber pilot) had a pilots watch with radium luminous dials. I always fancied getting it after his death, about 12 years ago, but nobody could find it - my brothers denied all knowledge, and I have absolutely no reason to doubt them. So it must be somewhere irradiating the roaches that will become our inevitable successors.

There are still contemporary watches that use radioactive isotopes like tritium for illumination. I’ve always wanted a watch with always-on lume.

Here is a good example, the Marathon GSAR. You can see the radioactive symbol on the dial.

https://www.marathonwatch.com/products/arctic-edition-large-...


Oh, I entirely agree. There are cool ways that radioactivity can be used entirely safely.

But I also understand that a lot of people don't understand -- so I see why even entirely safe uses of radioactivity are concerning to the public, even though they shouldn't be.


Nor Niven's "Yet Another Modest Proposal: The Roentgen Standard" - make coins out of radioactive waste. (https://www.larryniven.net/?q=yet-another-modest-proposal-th... albeit with an SSL certificate error.)

principles are easy when they're free

Indeed. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority; you only know that something is a real priority when you get an answer to the question "what will you sacrifice for this".


There were two red lines, as I understand it -- first, automated kill bots, and second, mass surveillance.

Mass domestic surveillance of American citizens (they were OK with surveillance of other countries).

Neither of those red lines should be controversial. What American citizen thinks terminators and Big Brother are desirable?

MAGA (as long as the terminators are pointed towards the other side)

Citizen 1?

The ones that still assume big brother will be spying on and killing the people they hate. Trump openly campaigned on getting revenge on his enemies. I can only assume his supporters want this. The danger of course is if/when the leopards eat their faces

No. There was only one red line.

Bend over and take or not.


I guess the problem for Trump is if he orders the army to gun down protesters, there’s a good chance they will refuse to do it. While a bot can just be prompted to go ahead.

Crazy to think how Deus Ex: Human revolution might have gotten the timeline right. Except there's no human augmentation and there won't be citizen fighting four-legged robot police in 2027 Detroit with molotov cocktails: they'll only hear a disconcerting buzz coming at them with ludicrous speed before eternal darkness.

This one here is the future I am most scared of.

What do you think ICE is for?

I'm guessing that this is an initial trial and they're intending to extend it further; 6 months is a reasonable trial period given the very rough metric for deciding who qualifies.

> Your complimentary subscription will expire at the end of the Benefit Period. After expiration, any existing subscription will continue unless you cancel. You may independently choose to purchase a paid Claude subscription at the then-current price through Anthropic’s standard signup process.

https://www.anthropic.com/claude-for-oss-terms


Sure. They're still figuring out exactly how to decide who qualifies for this -- seriously, 5000 github stars or 1M monthly NPM downloads? -- and they don't want to make long-term promises to people who might not qualify under future better-thought-out rules.

That doesn't mean they're not going to continue this, it just means they're being careful not to make promises which they'll want to roll back later.


If you change the email address, you change the commit hash. And yes, suddenly your local branches are orphaned.

Of course, there's nothing stopping you from using a git-only email address (nospam-6thbit@yourdomain) and routing that to /dev/null. GitHub can't change email addresses, but you can.


I think the important question here is whether Linux filesystems are more or less hazardous than statistical mechanics.

(For anyone not familiar with the text, Goodstein's treatment of the subject opens with "Ludwig Boltzman, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.")


facepalm

Yeah, that's what I get for posting late at night.


There seems to have been a spike of interest in BSDs on Hacker News lately; BSDCan is the leading BSD conference and has been held annually (pandemic excepted) since 2004. I'm on the organizing team and will be delivering a talk about FreeBSD 15.0 release engineering this year.

Happy to answer any questions here! And I'll be even happier if we get a large HN cohort showing up -- the conference is open to everyone, including people who are simply BSD-curious; you don't have to be a kernel hacker.


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