The Dead Past is one of my favorite Asimov stories. We don’t have the tech that’s in the story, but the idea of lost privacy is relevant today.

I am a boomer and I absolutely give a "flying fink". Stop stereotyping my generation. The group I worked in at NASA Goddard did visualizations of climate data. I heard directly from climate scientists what was going on in the world and it terrified me. When I heard about what's being done to NCAR I nearly cried. I have no children but I have told all my friends' kids how sorry I am that we're leaving them a mess to clean up. How's that for a "flying fink"?

(This is meant to be a reply to the post one up from this but it is dead)

The Boomer vote was almost evenly split between Trump and Harris. 50% Trump 49% Harris. Look to other generations for the main blame for Trump.

It's fun to play around with, but unless I'm missing something, it's not possible to specify the size, in rows and columns, of the screen, such as 24x80. It's an odd omission.

Agreed! Bees are my favorite social insect (we share a love of hexagons, for one thing) and they seem to be especially intelligent.

The hexagon is the best-agon

This thread is awesome.

I had a miniature war with some wasps staking a claim on my porch

Let me say, wasps are incredibly endurant creatures. I have much respect for them.

Their architecture though... I have the remnants of their enclave. It is so stable and uniform and cozy.

I wish wasps were friends.

I remember those monitors, but I forget what resolution they were. For what it's worth, Toy Story was rendered at 1536 x 922. I believe they re-rendered the whole thing from the RIB files for the bluray release.

Yes, there have been a couple re-render the whole thing. There was a good write up somewhere that I cannot find now where there was a discussion of keeping RenderMan bug compatible with the original or not. They also upped the shading rate and a few other quality knobs.

Film weave is also the bane of the VFX world. If a shot is going to have, say, a matte painting added in post, then a pin registered camera must be used. These cameras have a precisely machined pin that centers the film stock in the gate after the pull down claw retracts. Later post processing stages also use pin registered movements, so each frame is in exactly the same place every time it's used. Otherwise, the separate elements would weave against each other and give away the effect.

Larry Niven called them slidewalks and I've always been sorry this terminology never caught on.

The things I took away from reading Niven was transfer booths. The world has homogenized because information and people were transmitted instantly one from corner of the globe to another.

Ooohhh boy.

I loved the conservation of momentum "hack" for those teleportation booths. Go on, everyone who hasn't read it, see if you can guess how he dealt with that.

I love the ring world series until all the furry porn. He really should've stopped before coming up with rishing.

If you want to see this idea taken to the next level, you should read Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos. ;)

I have a tattoo of the tree ship yggdrasill.

The consul's tale should be required reading for anyone working in the tech field.

I consider the whole Cantos as a great book on ethics and empathy.

Funnily, every syncthing node on my network has a Farcaster folder.

Maybe I should read it again sometime.

In the UK, Singapore and maybe other countries with British influence, they use the word travelator, which I find quite cool as well.

Just like an escalator, but without the escalation!

Verizon handed their email service over to AOL some years ago. I wonder if this will be the end for my unused @verizon.com account.

AOL mail and Verizon mail had both been migrated to the yahoo mail backend when I left the company. This one kind of feels like a weird acquisition to me as that’s the story for a lot of AOL properties these days - a differently branded front end to the same services as their Yahoo counterpart. It would surely be much more costly to run AOL outside Yahoo as now you need to spread the costs of maintaining all that across fewer users

Ah, yes, you are correct, I had forgotten it was Yahoo that took over Verizon mail.

Somehow, my very first email, Hotmail (which was the only option when I got it really) is the only one from the 90s that is still kicking.

Yahoo! Mail is still working

That’s true. I mean it does get hacked every week, but it does still function.

Earthlink remains great.

> Verizon handed their email service over to AOL some years ago. I wonder if this will be the end for my unused @verizon.com account.

Yeah. I have some biz clients with long-held verizon.net email accounts. Ever since 2017, verizon.net has felt like some barely-there netherverse, where the laws of physics keep upending themselves for funsies.

In this analogy, the laws of physics are pop/imap/smtp settings (and auth req), which aren't at all well-tethered. I suspect the engineers have the server settings printed on D&D dice; I think they reroll their mail servers whenever the game isn't exciting enough.

So what happens to those biz email accounts now - now that the entire AOL snowglobe has been picked up by a different corporate toddler? I have no way to tell.

I always wanted to rig up a laptop that has an IMU to detect when it was in free fall and play the Wilhelm scream.

Great idea! Thinkpads (used to?) have an Active Protection System that used a Free Fall Sensor IMU to park the HDD read/write head in the event of a fall. Don't know if there's an API, though.

That was from Algol 68. Algol 60 used BEGIN/END blocks when the body of a do loop (or a then or else block, etc.) had more than one statement. Bash was influenced by Algol 68.