baltakatei

Utah: Monticello (Italian, but locally pronounced “monta sell-oh”)

You’re telling me there is no Walla Walla, England?

“Create a python script to count the number of r characters are present in the string strawberry.”

The number of 'r' characters in 'strawberry' is: 2

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Based on my cheatsheet, GNU Coreutils, sed, awk, ImageMagick, exiftool, jdupes, rsync, jq, par2, parallel, tar and xz utils are examples of commands that I frequently use but whose developers I don’t believe receive any significant cashflow despite the huge benefit they provide to software developers. The last one was basically taken over in by a nation-state hacking team until the subtle backdoor for OpenSSH was found in 2024-03 by some Microsoft guy not doing his assigned job.

Imagine if a lost Spanish armada finally arrived at Florida, centuries late, musket-wielding conquistadors raiding a coastal naval academy while a prominent political VIP was giving a speech, taking them hostage like Hernán Cortés did with Moctezuma II (Aztec Empire) or Francisco Pizarro with Atahualpa (Inca Empire).

I think it involved a planet called …

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So, you’re telling me my plan to measure atmospheric oxygen isotope trends over geologic time by grinding up sharks is bust?

and then ends it, always leaving you wanting more

After several years of reading, I have realized that most of his books fall into the “Status Quo” genre, much like Marvel movies in which superheroes are cops that work to prevent relatable characters or governments from falling too out of sync with reality. The second their dystopian speculations start to imagine a society better off (due to redistribution of concentrated power or wealth), they immediately end.

Diamond Age (1994): corporations control society by controlling the centralized Feeds that supply matter compilers, justifying their monopoly by saying they keep society stable. MC publishes blueprints for compiling your own Feed. Story ends.

Anathem (2008): The government executes most scientists en masse and imprisons most survivors because technology was too disruptive 3000 years ago. A new global disaster forces the release of the scientists so they can wield ancient technology to solve the crisis. Story ends.

Cryptonomicon (1999) / The Great Simoleon Caper (1994): Some cryptographers think Bitcoin is a good idea even if it might topple governments. They publish it. Story ends.

Termination Shock (2021): Climate change can be solved by billionaires by getting governments addicted to shooting sulfur into the atmosphere. The story ends basically as soon as the operation begins.

Seveneves (2015): The moon blows up, forcing a crash course construction of a modern Noah’s Ark in the form of a fleet of spaceships in low Earth orbit. Eccentric billionaires sacrifice themselves to make the project work to save seven genius women who rebuild society with eugenics and a racial caste system. They discover some pre-disaster survivors whose culture is incompatible with the new society. Talks begin for reïntegration. Story ends.

Fall (2019): People upload and emulate their brains into datacenter computers. The first rich people to upload themselves gain an enormous first mover advantage in the digital afterlife and control the minds of newcomers whose surviving families pay ludicrous amounts of money to keep the dead billionaire-controlled Bitworld running. The system keeps running smoothly until the admin with the credentials to shut everything down dies, is uploaded, defeats the incumbent dead billionaire, thus making the world more equitable. Story ends.

The closest thing to an exception I can find is Atmosphæra Incognita (2014; part of Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future), in which a billionaire fights environmental regulations and NIMBY pushback to build a 20-kilometer steel tower to reduce space launch costs by acting as scaffolding for a mass driver. Although the story portrays most people as against the construction of such an audacious structure, and although the main beneficiaries are corporations wealthy enough to purchase space on the tower to install equipment, if you weigh your definition of “society” towards billionaires and their company org charts, then the story is about breaking the Status Quo (of NIMBY California landowners).

If battery technology werenʼt still stuck in the Vietnam War era, 2-second rapid charging would require something like a thick boi USB-B cable to satisfy everyoneʼs desire to also use their phone as a tazer/hand grenade/flying drone/cardiac defibrillator/space heater.

Synology is a NAS Iʼd recommend. However, after you become more familiar with the command line and if you are building your own Debian machine with a motherboard that supports many hard drives, I would recommend something like this procedure; this applies especially if you are the only one who will be accessing the files and are just wanting a way to combine the storage capacities of multiple hard drives.

Elective surgery though…

Time colonists!

GNU Steve Irwin

Banks will use progressively less energy per capita as bulk data processing becomes more energy efficient, assuming they donʼt transition to using proof-of-work.

Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd’s 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).

Edit: Fixed URL. Edit2; Add transcript link.

See List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet for the graveyard list. Sorting by Price helps. Some other notable companies that Google acquired rather than compete with:

• Nest Labs (home automation)
• DropCam (home automation)
• DoubleClick (advertisement)
• FitBit (wearables)
• Waze (GPS navigation)
• Skybox Imaging (satellite mapping)
• Like.com (shopping)
• Meebo (social network)
• GrandCentral (VOIP)
• Picasa (photographry)
• Tenor (GIF search)
• PhotoMath (LLM; became Bard)

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the fall started.

In my opinion, it was when anti-trust laws did not trigger upon Google acquiring YouTube because Google Video couldn’t compete. That meant it was open season on start-ups that otherwise might have grown to kill Google or other big tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.