nitin-pai

The atomic and space 'races' were advertised to confer decisive geopolitical advantages on the countries that possessed them. Clearly that didn't happen. The Soviets got their bomb four years after the US, and similarly the US caught up with the Soviets in space. Neither enjoyed a decisive advantage.

More importantly, their 'race' didn't prevent others from developing their own bombs and space capabilities.

For a moment I thought this was about Manzikert, Tonsure, Shriek and Finch...of Jeff Vandermeer's Ambergris trilogy.

I have a simple hack to achieve most of the advantages of the Daylight Computer: set the display of your computer, tablet or smartphone to greyscale. Voila!

Promite is better than Vegemite.

We create the future we imagine: so it is important to imagine the future we wish to create.

A lot of the confusion and anxiety will melt away if we distinguish the terms “optimal” and “desirable”.

The most desirable amount of fraud, corruption or tax evasion is zero.

In the real world we don’t get what we desire. The closest we can came is to the optimal amount, where the marginal cost has to equal the marginal benefit.

Github says the Mac app is available but the website only says coming soon. The binary is not available for download. Disappointing.

Thoughts are somewhat like electric current: prefers lower resistance paths to the ground.

Twitter succeeded because it is the least resistance path to an audience. Blogs in comparison are kiloohms of resistance.

What happened to technorati?

There is no advantage in doing this. Typing words fully and correctly, with correct spelling and grammar, is a skill worth preserving.

Mastodon (more correctly, the Fediverse) is far more suited for interest-based communities than Twitter is.

With communities getting onto their own servers (journa.host, econtwitter.net) the quality of network effects is increasing.

Twitter/X will end up as a place to share stuff that riles people up.

There is no bigotry in the post and the references to monasteries are not even disparaging.

An earlier thread on why an everything app is bad for liberal democracy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33151774

Julian Dibbell outlines how the ancient Greeks used tech to appoint officials, establish identification, make decisions and enforce rules.