Few loose marbles for your jigsaw, use as you please.
Lucky unhappy creature, you nailed it (at least if you ask me). Twice.
Circles of dreamers, merrily dancing around technodgod of their choice. Hail Crypto!
"Optimism is cowardice", Spengler.
I am afraid that most people only care about just one thing, and dreaming does not stand in a way of it, maybe even helps.
Feels terrible, to be shaken out of the dream, eh? OTOH, a real porridge, poor smell but what an honor!
Universe goes towards maximum entropy, so reason is, in fact, against the odds. Squared, if it happens on top of life.
It might be good nobody takes words too seriously. Blaming the messenger is not nice on the receiving end. The species is going to harvest all that it saws, both short and long term.
So? Perhaps his kid will hkac MINIX. According to wiki page[1], there is only 6000 lines in its kernel. Not everybody has to start by cakhing a monolith. As long as there are smaller things.
EDIT: Yes, Linux kernel slowly approaches point when gigabyte of source is a long gone story of a past. I doubt there anybody out there who can say they actually understand the whole of it. And this is probably bad for a lot of reasons, of which being not accessible to a beginner is one of the smallest concern.
EDIT2: Even more so for hardware which is harder to investigate under the hood and probably much less understood - when was the last time when you could claim to have inner mental model of your computer and software on it?
Perhaps I am going too far with my speculation, but GT strikes me on two aspects as being highly unusual, with regard to what I "know"[1] about hunter-gatherer societies.
1. The site seems to be built with a plan. Maybe they did not use paper and pencil, maybe they were using some kind of sand table[2]. And there was a number of people involved, who were quite good at stone cutting, and on a large scale. Just have a look at central obelisk and pedestal [3] - those sharp edges, those smooth surfaces. Now, getting good at something requires daily practice, for a long period of time during which one would rather not go around for hunting. So not only there was a population of proto-carpenters but also societal structure to support them, at least for times of learning and construction work.
2. Even more unusual, the site seems to have been abandoned (evacuated?) in planned manner. Great effort has been made to cover it up with huge mass of soil mixed up with broken stones, as if to make it tougher against elements. This, for me, really stands out. AFAIK the norm is, when supporting culture "loses interest" in site maintainance (like, when all its members are dead), the site is being taken over and/or decaying and/or reused by next wave of humans. But not this time.
Quite fascinating.
[1] what I know is subject to change as time goes by and I get updates
"Lake Toba is the site of a massive supervolcanic eruption estimated at VEI 8 that occurred 69,000 to 77,000 years ago, representing a climate-changing event. It is the largest known explosive eruption on Earth in the last 25 million years. According to the Toba catastrophe theory [2], it had global consequences for human populations; it killed most humans living at that time and is believed to have created a population bottleneck in central east Africa and India, which affects the genetic make up of the human worldwide population to the present."
Solar radiation, changes in Earth's orbit (it has been proved to be chaotic, longterm, AFAIK), microvawe from space hitting steam in atmosphere, volcanic production. There are few things that come to my head and might be connected to the problem. Some of this may sound as fringe. Nevertheless I would like to see credible debunking, using data and logic. May include calculus. If I see worth, I will relearn calculus. Heck, it may include whatever that will make me want to think about it - models, tables, photos.
Given the gravity of the problem and weight on future if there is miscalculation, I claim this should be taken out of politicians' hands. Wikipedia style.
The hockeystick scandal did not help, either.
And last but not least: what made the last glaciation melt and what caused it in first place? Model, please. Something I can compile on my computer. Twenty five years ago, maybe twenty, it would have easily placed itself among first ten fastest supercomputers (if I am correct). I am sure this machine can handle some computation. Even if not, give me a source code and let me worry how to run it.
EDIT: Ok, I would prefer a bunch of equation, differential too, rather than source code.
EDIT2: As of "being caused at least to a considerable degree by human activity", I am already rather certain that humans did their best to be part of the problem. The question I am trying to answer is "to what degree", not "if".
First things first - I would not call me a denier, but I would call me understander.
An outcome from what I have read somewhere was that, if Sun increased its output by 1% (and kept it so for some years) it would cause equivalent warming to the one observed now. As far as I can say, Sun's activity was never constant. There may be other factors as well.
On few occassions I showed this page to believers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles - I do not remember getting any answer. The question was simple: what caused previous global warmings? What made the last glaciation melt down? I have searched for Milankovitch on HN and this was posted few times, but always zero comments from what I can see.
But it should, whenever negativity describes reality...
I use FVWM. I've been using it back in 1990ties. It worked. It works. It is invisible - I really don't require pah-nels and blinks, so I reduced it (editing config files in real editor, heh) to just virtual desktop, few useful shortcuts and some icons. For some sensory stuff I use gkrellm - it gives me a clock, too.
I was using Afterstep, Gnome (2? and 3?) and KDE. All started to fail after one upgrade or another. Unity is a bit too unbearable to me. Came back to FVWM, undusted old configs, all good now. About two months ago I replaced kdeterm with roxterm, which starts about two or three times faster. I guess I am mostly kde- and gnome- free at the moment.
I realize I am in some kind of diminishing minority. As long as I can recompile the source I am not going to complain (too much). Strange times. Who would have imagined I would start thinking of game against open source using older version of it?
BTW, if there are any FVWM devs here, thank you a lot. And please, I beg you on my knees - do not improve. But just in case, I will stash a source code somewhere.
I had some doubts myself before buying my first e-ink based device. It helped a lot to watch movies on y-t where guys were test driving them.
Not all e-ink displays are of equal quality. The newer ones should be ok, those claiming 16 levels of grey. However the definitive test should be made by your very own eyes.
Notes & tracking: emacs + org-mode. Not ideal, but I can have it and it does 60% of the job out of the box.
Storing: filesystem (notes include where I stored it).
Reading: E-ink.
I started with Pocketbook 622 (a 6", 800x600 display). Worked very well. Can open many formats _natively_ (doc, rtf, djvu etc, check specs for full list). One of the first docs was anatomy atlas from 19century via archive. Rendered only decently, required huge magnification/landscape mode/margin cutting to be of any use. I had varying experience with other pdf/djvu documents - depending how they were created. Some djvus rendered excellently on 6", despite being meant for bigger (close to a4) page size. No problem with rtf/epub and other such formats. Magazines in pdf (a4) very hard to read, not worth it really. Arxiv's pdfs looked good/very good, sometimes they could be reflowed or put into column view, which helped a lot but with reflow I learned math not always shows up properly. Old computer manuals (my hobby, they are just scaned typewritten books) - not good enough.
Next model was Inkpad 840 (a 8", 1600x1200 display). What looks good on Pb622, looks good too on Ip840. Magazines look better, but they require a good light for really comfortably reading. Otherwise, I can go with dim night light. This model has backlight, but I don't like the idea of shining into my eyes.
Huge plus: sd card slot. I go on for months airgapped.
Huge minus: maybe it is just me, but reading html docs almost always sucks one way or another.
What to look for: external hard case so I don't have to be oh so wary. It was a PITA trying to find case for Ip840 thanks to its nonstandard dimensions. I settled down with some oversized tablet case.
Ip840 feels a bit slow and awkward (compared to Pb622) but I got used to it. If I had to buy again, I would have had a closer look on Kobo models too. Kindle does not cut it for me - requires too big commitment.
Lucky unhappy creature, you nailed it (at least if you ask me). Twice.
Circles of dreamers, merrily dancing around technodgod of their choice. Hail Crypto!
"Optimism is cowardice", Spengler.
I am afraid that most people only care about just one thing, and dreaming does not stand in a way of it, maybe even helps.
Feels terrible, to be shaken out of the dream, eh? OTOH, a real porridge, poor smell but what an honor!
Universe goes towards maximum entropy, so reason is, in fact, against the odds. Squared, if it happens on top of life.
It might be good nobody takes words too seriously. Blaming the messenger is not nice on the receiving end. The species is going to harvest all that it saws, both short and long term.