jaza

That's some good shit right there!

Nope, sorry, Norwegians actually tax mining / energy corporations (so the government has money to spend on... designer dunnies!), instead of just giving away their non-renewable natural resources to billionaires for free. That's un-Australian!

Cycling through the Andes mountains is far more appealing to most people than cycling through the Brazilian savanna is, for various practical reasons. Steep and windy vs flat and tedious. Sweeping varying scenery vs close-range monotonous scenery. Sometimes cool vs always hot. Dry dirt (in dry season at least) vs muddy dirt. Less bugs vs more bugs. Less (although still quite a few) infectious diseases vs full-on tropical infectious diseases.

I've tried (more than once) to learn salsa, I did about as well as most white male programmers do at it. :P

Yes, sadly, coding is a skill that can and (before long) will be forgotten by all but a niche dedicated few. It will go the way of assembly language, smith-ing, weaving, bread-baking, meat- / fish-gutting, hunting, remembering phone numbers, driving manual (and, before long, driving in human mode), hand-writing, horse-riding, wood-chopping... you get the picture. The price of progress!

AFAIK Hacker News was built (about 2 decades ago) by Paul Graham completely in Lisp (I assume with CGI) and AFAIK that's still how it runs today.

Back in the 1990s, thousands of non-devs the world over built "software" using Excel and VBA macros. Devs then spent much of the 2000s rewriting that mess using more robust alternatives. I think this will just be groundhog day all over again: the 2020s is magical miracle AI software-generating software, and the 2030s will be the grown-ups coming back to clean up the dumpster fires.

"The equal but opposite of the one-child-policy" is easier said than done. A brute-force approach worked for stopping more babies (I don't know if it's true, but what I heard back was that back in the 80s Chinese officials literally killed unauthorised babies moments after they were born - that's probably exaggerated, however they really did carry out forced sterilisations and forced abortions). It wouldn't work so well for creating more babies. You can't force people to have more children. Many countries are offering financial incentives for producing babies right now - cash at birth, free house, free childcare, etc - with limited success. I don't see how China could deliver (hahaha aren't I punny) a significantly different result if it goes down that same road.

Not that strange, actually, once you understand the geography and ethnography. First of all (although not that significant), straight line distance between the population centres of AU and PNG is further than that of AU and NZ: Sydney to Port Moresby ~4 hours by direct flight, Sydney to Auckland ~3 hours. More significantly, the whole ~1000km length of Cape York Peninsula is one hell of a barrier: virtually uninhabited, no sealed roads most of the way, and extremely inhospitable (cyclones and mass flooding for several months every year, killer crocodiles / jellyfish everywhere, prevalence of dengue fever / malaria).

The Torres Strait Islanders are genetically and culturally part of the peoples of New Guinea, which is why here in Australia we refer to "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples", why the TSIs have their own flag that's different to the Aboriginal flag, etc. We non-indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand share the same predominantly British ancestry, a very similar (and intertwined) colonial / post-colonial history, etc.

In all except the very least-developed countries in the world today, being without electricity for more than a few days would quickly result in significant lawlessness, starvation, and water shortages. So not an "extinction level event", but quite feasibly a "collapse of nation-states as we know them" event.

Also missing (a big chunk of) the Indian Pacific (east to west coast, has passenger services several times a week).

Indeed - the enshittification of the enshittification!

I think the author's main point is bemoaning the loss of human-crafted works (he mentions coding and the paintbrush). (Putting "slaves" in the title is IMHO a poorly worded distraction from that point.)

I get it (with coding at least), I too have spent decades hand-crafting code, and I take pride in the fruit of my labour, and it saddens me to think that I and my peers are perhaps like the blacksmiths of a century or so ago, ie the final generation doing what we do in significant numbers. But I have faith that there will always be a new kind of blacksmith.

When you think about it honestly, we really don't know anything about anything. We don't know how many planets there are in the galaxy (nor in the universe, nor in the multiverse, nor if there is a multiverse). We don't know what the chances are of a given planet being habitable (nor what "habitable (for all possible life)" means, nor what "all possible life" means). And we don't know what the chances are of life existing on a given habitable planet. So apart from the fact that all of the above probabilities may well be at or near zero, we're barely even capable of articulating the necessary questions, let alone searching for answers.

Yes!

https://thebullshitmachines.com/

I rented it from my local Blockbuster-type store back in the 90s ("Civic Video", was one of the bigger chains here in Australia back then), they had maybe 50+ Mega Drive titles at the time, was just random chance that they had that one. Not the best ever adventure RPG, but I enjoyed it as a kid and I still enjoy it now. I managed to buy it recently from a retro gaming store without too much difficulty, and there appear to be several original copies available for sale online.

I haven't tried Sega games on Switch (and I believe some were available on Wii before that?). But I have also played some of my old games on PC emulators. "Save state" / "load state" is indeed very handy. Keyboard mappings is an inferior experience to a real controller, but meh, you get used to it.

It wasn't to make my old games look good - it was just to make them work, period. I only have a flat-screen TV with digital inputs, I don't have a CRT. The HDMI adapter (which includes the converter / scaler) was about 50 bucks, a CRT could have easily cost more than that (and would quite possibly have taken longer to find, would have a shorter remaining lifespan, would require more maintenance, etc). Space is an issue, I live in a small-ish apartment. I guess the retro experience would be more authentic with a CRT, but it's authentic enough for me on a modern TV, and it's simple and it works.

Still got my Mega Drive, purchased circa 1994. Recently brought it back to life with a Level Hike (I know, apparently RAD2x is better, anyway works well enough for me) HDMI adapter (otherwise sadly it doesn't work with new digital-only TVs), the main unit and all my old games (Sonic 1 and 2, Columns, Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, Wonder Boy in Monster World, Shining Force (needed new battery in cartridge for save state), Sword of Vermilion) still functioning perfectly after all these years (just needed some vigorous dusting of bottom of cartridges). Got my kids on it, they love it: "dad, so cool, boots up instantly, no lag, no ads" (unlike the rubbish apps on their other devices!).

Awesome to hear that Linux has arrived on Mega Drive. Just need it to boot up (how Sonic 1 boots up saying "seee-gaah") and to drone out "liii-nuux", hahaha.

Agreed. We enjoyed a decade or more or cheap surplus hardware sitting in data centres, after the dot com crash. Rinse and repeat after the AI bubble bursts in x time from now (my forecast is x = 2-3 years).

Seriously though, we have Star Trek IV to thank in no small part for this amazing humpback comeback success story. Live long and prosper!

Thanks for clarifying, I thought that sounded wrong - otherwise aeroplane engines would have to be "rebuilt", each and every time, after more than half of all international flights in and out of Australia (5000 miles, aka 8000km, is just down the road to grab a sausage roll for us!).

Very punny :P

11ty is my favourite site builder. Hugo is better in terms of dev support / build speed / opinionated simplicity - and I've also used Hugo several times - but quite often I've run into a wall where Hugo isn't flexible enough to let me do things the way I want. 11ty lets you do (almost) whatever the hell you please.

I'm sad to hear that the "OG 11ty era" has ended. But, as others have noted, fortunately 11ty will live on, so long as folks keep using it and hacking away at it.

Also sounds a bit like Joel Spolsky's desktop app CityDesk from back in the day.

Check out TinaCMS. Works for editing Hugo sites. Not as nice as WordPress admin, but it's good enough for simple editing tasks.

This. The 11ty sites that I've built (all personal sites that will only ever be edited by me) are all plain HTML, no markdown. 11ty is lovely and bare-bones and un-opinionated.

Yep. Gambling is Australia's version of America's gun problem. We've recently banned kids from social media, yet we're apparently unable to ban gambling ads from kids content. Every time the (various levels of) government here talk about even the tiniest new gambling related regulation, somehow - definitely totally without any brown paper bags whatsoever going into any back pockets - it doesn't seem to actually happen. Magic!

My main bank is Commonwealth aka CBA (one of the "big 4" banks here in Australia). For a long time, I held out against installing their mobile app (on Android), and managed fine with their web UI (and with 2FA codes via SMS). Then, 2 or 3 years ago, I needed to start using PayID (sort-of Australia's version of Venmo, ie free instant transfers, except it's supported directly by all the major banks here). And I discovered that CBA had (deliberately?) only added PayID support to their mobile app, you absolutely can't use it in their web UI (last I checked). So I had to finally relent and install the mobile app. I started out only opening it on the rare occasions when I needed to send money to someone via PayID.

Then, a while later, CBA pretty much phased out SMS-based 2FA (or they said that if you had the mobile app installed then you can no longer use it?). Only other supported option is in-app 2FA (no support for third-party TOTP apps). So I had to start opening the mobile app every time I needed a 2FA code. Then, within the last year or so, they made a new rule, that in order to log in to the web UI at all (just initial login, I'm not talking about sending money or any other high-risk action), you had to receive a push notification via the mobile app and tap "allow". So now I literally can't log in to the web UI without also logging in to the mobile app!

So, unfortunately, "just keep using the bank's website on desktop" is increasingly and deliberately becoming not an option. I assume there are many similar stories with other banks around the world.