Since I work in Bay Area tech I’ve met a bunch of people who do, like Guido van Rossum and Sergey Brin. But I only really know one, an astronomer I used to work with.

Oh look, it’s me.

And not just any god, but the right god and worship in the right way? People were literally killing each other over whether altars should have rails around them or not and how a church’s middle management should be organized.

By almost every measure, the world is better than it has ever been. Violence, poverty, starvation are all at or near record lows worldwide. Average lifespans are way up. We are just way, way more aware of what is going on in the world, and bad news drives more clicks than good news.

There are some cracks, no doubt. For example climate change is showing its ugly head, inequality is rising in the US and some other developed countries, and lifespans are taking a slight dip in parts of the US. But, compared to almost anywhere at any time during history, this is a golden age.

There was an interesting physics paper recently that suggested that time travel was possible, but you wouldn’t be able to travel to before when the machine was built. Of course, it also would require an impossibly huge amount on energy, but that’s a problem for the engineers.

Much like all of life. Expectations cause suffering.

Minidisc was super cool. I never had one, but some of my college friends did and it just seemed so much better than a Discman.

That was the path I took, but I remember a few college friends and several professors had a Zip drive, as did many of the computers in the lab. By the time I had the money and the need for something like that, 1Gb flash drives were cheaper.

When I was a very junior EE I ended up working mostly on microcontroller code. There was one bit of extremely ugly code I inherited that parsed a terribly designed serial communication protocol by using a giant maze of nested if statements. I really wanted to rewrite it to something better, but I never quite came up a solution while I worked there. Years later after I was no longer at the company I had a stress dream about it and finally came up with a working solution. I still wish I could go fix it. I really hope it’s no longer used, or that someone else has finally fixed it.

That’s going to be a function of your SD card reader and the quality of the card itself. If you’re really concerned, copy it to your HDD, then read again and verify. And then when writing, do a verify step as well.

Uh, you very much can take an image of an SD card, the same as with any other block device.

A write off is a colloquialism that refers to reducing your effective taxed income. A more realistic example would be, let’s say you make $250k, but you’re self employed and spent $50k on business expenses like a car and office space. Then you can write off that $50k and only pay taxes like you made $200k.

Heart attack. I’ve had a lot of problems with strep in my life due to an immune gap, which tends to weaken your heart.

They are people who have fallen for and/or are grifting for a deeply unhinged conspiracy theory that national laws don’t apply to them if they do some certain set of pseudo legal things. What exactly those things are, as well as what laws don’t apply to them,vary widely, but are usually centered around driver’s licenses and car registration, tax evasion and not paying child support.

Past that it’s hard to explain what their beliefs are because it is so vague and ever changing.

Portland and Minneapolis? So like, a protest/campout in one or two square blocks while everyone else goes about their normal business?

Christ do I feel old now. CDs and DVDs are read only, so you won’t do anything to them by ripping them. It’s just a copy of the data onto your drive and then probably a compression step of some sort. Nowadays it probably takes less than five minutes for the whole thing. I remember taking at least half an hour on a 2x drive, and then mp3 compression taking another hour or so.

Which word?

Once upon a time the entire internet was an irrelevant nerd clubhouse. Those were good days.

It’s not you, it’s the apps. They’re set up that way to get you to pay for them.

Dating apps are deeply, deeply enshitified because the economic incentive for them is the exact opposite of what monogamous users want. Specifically, the apps want you to keep subscribing, plus buy the super platinum plus extra added packs, but never really find someone and date them, because then you stop paying. Old school pre-sellout OKCupid had a great analysis of this in their blog, which was taken down the day they sold out.

This is why the few sites/apps that cater to non-monogamous or event based communities are still reasonably decent, e.g FetLife, Bloom and Feeld, though Feeld is partially down the enshitification pathway.

I’d be really interested in seeing what a fediverse dating app would be like, something that didn’t have the financial incentive to enshitify, and maybe had a match/search system like old-school OKC.

EDIT: missing word.