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A pelican GIF in a Pelican(TM) MP4 container.

Is this satire?

We’re quickly entering a new era of energy abundance, without needing to constantly dig up, process, and cart around enormous amounts of oil. And solar has recently gotten cheap enough that people in poorer countries around the world are deploying huge amounts of it. That’s pretty amazing!

What does this have to do with my question?

You asked if it's satire, I gave you a reason it might not be.

No not at all. The world is way better off today than at any time in the past. This is objectively true and we can all feel it everyday we don't die of dysentery, sepsis, etc.

how many dysenteries make a nuclear explosion?

Can you put that in terms I can understand? How many measles outbreaks per vaccine refusals is that?

Exactly. How many of one bad thing reduced compensates for a different bad thing increased? They say it's better now because we have fast access to information. But we don't have house stability. How many seconds of latency to information equals owning a home?

This looks like a scene out of Enterprise.


As I somewhat recall there also an issue with correlating IMDB with Netflix ratings at one point.

There always seems to be an incompatibility between the people who made it, the people who use it, and the people who want to contribute. The latter two often try, but the former isn't interested in the help or has a very specific vision for the project and doesn't allow any input that isn't in line with that even if it's not in conflict.

It's hard to fault anyone in that triad 100%. Open source has a way of becoming infrastructure. People come to depend on tools made by people without the resources, interest, or personality to run an infrastructure project, or who won't budge on their vision to allow contributions outside of it that might help get the project to a point where it can attract enough vision-aligned contributors.

Forking potentially shifts the problem to a new triad, so it's not an obvious solution in all cases.


> the former isn't interested in the help or has a very specific vision for the project and doesn't allow any input that isn't in line with that

I've come to call this "fenceware": technically open source due to its licensing, but community-wise it is as if the developers just throw a ball of code over the fence every few months. Sure, they let you play with it for a bit, but it is not yours to co-own.


Why not if you are free to fork it and do whatever you want with it ?


The classic NAND-me-down. My first personal computer was a "broken" 486 system I got for $25 at a yard sale. All it needed was a hard drive.

It could have been bought old and upgraded. Not everyone had the luxury of a brand new first computer.

Possibly, but even mother boards supporting 32MB would be rare. Perhaps on "DX3"?

As for a new computer and price - it was like $1000 to get AMD 486DX2-80 with 4MB RAM in '95...


So this depends if it was a 72 pin DIMM board. I don't think you could get there (easily?) on a 30 pin board, but 72 may have had native support for 64 out of the box.

I upgraded a ~1992 Dell 486 DX2 to 36MB (original 4MB + 32MB...or was it a pair of 16MB sticks? hard to remember) around 1997 or so.

Blogger was new when TV was 75 years old. Glad to see it's still around.

What is it? The page is vague to the point of uselessness.

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