The whale's been eaten now. The broader Internet is mostly not trustworthy, or convenient, and the information is not even very plentiful.

People will and are retreating into high-trust zones. In-person networks, product recommendations from real friends, and closed group chats.

It's not the end of the world, but things have changed. We'll have to put more work into finding information than we're used to.

It means if I'm doing very light processing (sums) I should try to move that to structure-of-arrays to take advantage of cache? But if I'm doing something very expensive, I can leave it as array-of-structures, since the computation will dominate the memory access in Amdahl's Law analysis?

This data should tell me something about organizing my data and accessing it, right?

Run time - This makes development faster. Python, Lua, and Node.js projects can typically test out small changes locally faster than Rust and C++ can recompile. (I say this as a pro Rust user - The link step is so damned slow.)

Container - This gives you a virtual instance of "apt-get". System package managers can't change, so we abstract over them and reuse working code to fit a new need. I am this very second building something in Docker that would trash my host system if I tried to install the dependencies. It's software that worked great on Ubuntu 22.04, but now I'm on Debian from 2026. Here I am reusing code that works, right?

VM - Containers aren't a security sandbox. VMs allow multiple tenants to share hardware with relative safety. I didn't panic when the Spectre hacks came out - The cloud hosts handled it at their level. Without VMs, everyone would have to run their own dedicated hardware? Would I be buying a dedicated CPU core for my proof-of-concept app? VMs are the software equivalent of the electrical grid - Instead of everyone over-provisioning with the biggest generator they might ever need, everyone shares every power station. When a transmission line drops, the lights flicker and stay on. It's awe-inspiring once you realize how much work goes into, and how much convenience comes out of, that half-second blip when you _almost_ lose power but don't.

Hypervisor - A hypervisor just manages the VMs, right?

Come on. Don't walk gaily up to fences. Most of it's here for a reason.

I don't know if even right-wingers like this age verification crap, maybe they put up with it from Republicans so they can vote against abortion and I put up with it from Democrats so I can vote for abortion.

Of course, if you vote for a third party, you're spoilering your side. Every country is a group project run by underpaid people to try to please millions of uninformed haters. Still better than dying of dysentery, I guess.

Say a typical cost of living is $50,000 per year. If you make $100,000 per year after tax, you can spend that extra $50,000 per year on political efforts - Lobbying, propaganda, political campaigns, soft power, hard power, land-grabs, etc.

If you have a billion dollars, you make about 30 million per year in returns. Cost of living is a rounding error.

Every billionaire is capable of outspending 600 six-figure software engineers, while sitting on their ass all day every day, or networking, or playing tennis. I think they realize this.

Do you think it is dangerous for a civilization when someone can dedicate all their waking hours to amassing power through any means possible, while they have more financial power than 600 middle-class people?

- $30k for anything that helps my community / humanity

- $100k for anything harmless that I just don't give a damn about

- 3 million per month after tax to work on weapons of war

Someone is weakening America for a takeover

Since the government and corporations aggressively spy on everyone, and since government programs are often incompetent or overfunded or underfunded or corrupted or evil, there is (justly) little faith in the government.

Cash works fine. It can't be censored easily, it can't be tracked easily. ATMs have it.

When I trust the phones, I'll use phone payments.

There's no one silver bullet, it will have to be a multi-front push:

1. Just build more

2. Zone for multi-family housing

3. Get rid of minimum parking and minimum lot size requirements

4. Allow mixed-user residential and commercial buildings

5. Shift property tax towards taxing the land and exempting buildings from tax, to force speculators to sell vacant land and derilect buildings for development

6. When things start moving, invest in walkability and public transit to support dense urban cores. Cars are great for low-density, but paying for miles of road and polluted air in dense city cores is silly behavior