Mostly I drove through Texas to avoid Oklahoma (one of my least favorite states), but the Guadalupe Mountains were very nice.

I'm not sure I'd call it 'clean' though; the air seemed awfully smoggy and I saw almost as many flaring wells as I did in North Dakota. But there were lots of open spaces and the people were friendly.

Washington, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Utah get my vote for the best places to do a parks/forests vacation, depending on your interests.

I guess my trip was probably biased towards states with lots of parks and forests, who probably had more incentive to protect their local environments.

And I chuckled at how they used the "Don't mess with Texas" phrase despite having much lower littering fines than most other states.

Like with everything else in this country, it's all about the marketing.

Anyways, plenty of countries have security agencies whose main job is to violently protect the local kleptocrats these days. China might be a better example to point to for even worse behavior, with their balkanized net and mass surveillance being used to carry out the mass internment and repression of ethnic minorities in regions like Xinjiang.

It's a flexible way of writing one-off applications; you can run them locally, remotely, or on someone else's machine in the cloud. One useful example is Tabula[1], a browser-based utility for extracting tabular data from PDFs. As it is often used by journalists and other organizations that don't want to leak the data they are analyzing all over the place, it is easy to run locally instead of uploading files to their website. You just point the browser to 'localhost:port' while the server is running.

[1]: https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula

It's pretty big, but there are only so many variations on "tree", "mountain", "valley", "cave", "swimmy thing", "flying thing", "walking thing", etc etc.

It's not like you can ever expect to walk over the next hill and see an octo-monkey spiraling across the veldt.

They're nice because like you said, discussion can be much more helpful than a single answer.

The second core is meant to handle the network stack, leaving the first core to focus on program logic. With ESP8266s, it can be hard to write complex applications while keeping heavy WiFi usage stable.

Although, I'll bet the 8266 firmwares and libraries have improved a lot since I was using them.

Even if you had a magic box that could turn wafers into dies, you'd still need to be able to source the wafers, ensure an extremely clean environment, screen for imperfections/failures, and package the dies into chips which are robust enough to be handled, soldered, etc.

Some people like Jeri Ellsworth have managed to fabricate individual transistors in the garage, which is extremely impressive, but it's still a long way from there to a packaged integrated circuit.

One step at a time though, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Scale_Integration

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_bonding

I had been making magnetic snap-together circuits, so I had a bunch of small PCBs with simple 2- and 3-pin footprints and holes that I soldered neodymium disc magnets into.

I put a big TO-220 N-fet on one of them, and stuck it to a laminated whiteboard so that the magnets stuck without shorting together, then I hooked it up to an LED as a simple high-side switch.

When I bent the transistor so that its metal plane rested against the magnetic whiteboard, its gate would latch after briefly tapping either V+ or ground to the magnet which was connected to the pin. When the transistor's metal plane was perpendicular to the board, it didn't latch. Disconnecting and reconnecting the LED didn't perturb the 'saved' value, and neither did removing power overnight. And the same thing happened with a similar P-fet connected as a low-side switch.

It probably wasn't a "real" latch; it was a very over-sized transistor with low gate capacitance, and I didn't try it with something like a 3904. I think it might have had something to do with the principles behind nonvolatile ferroelectric RAM, but I never did get to the bottom of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferroelectric_RAM

RISC-V has also been maturing over the same timeframe, which is bringing mainstream open-source efforts deeper into the stack of general-purpose computers.

We still don't have an open-source VLSI fab, but costs are always falling and Magic has been open-source for decades, so maybe it's only a matter of time until samizdat-style CPUs become possible :)

Or it would, if I had any left. If the law doesn't apply equally to everyone, it's not a legal system so much as a way to selectively keep people down.

I was once driving along I-10, which is an 8-lane / 80mph interstate. CBP had blockaded the entire road, and were pulling every single car and truck off to be questioned and searched.

My truck had a canopy with heavily-tinted windows that could have easily fit a few people, but I don't "look foreign", so they waved me through without even glancing at my ID or vehicle. From the people who had been pulled off, it looked like their job was to hassle people with brown skin.

I can't fathom how it isn't a violation of the Constitution to (ostensibly) search every individual driving along a major highway. What ever happened to 'probabale cause'? Is living in the US considered evidence of committing a crime in the US nowadays?

What is 'we' to us (and whatever other life is out in space) could be 'me' to the universe, and some philosophers like Spinoza have explored the idea of a "God" which is more or less defined as the empirical laws of this universe.

And sure, eventually this universe will also die. But that's okay, because it is also probably part of some larger entity which will also eventually end, and so on. That's how I choose to interpret the infinite, and it brings me comfort because it lets me see death as a change in perspective rather than a finality. It also helps me practice empathy, by not seeing much difference between what I feel and what others feel.

The idea of collective transcendence is also interesting. One work which explored it was Alpha Centauri, a Civilization-style game where the players' colonies crash-land on a planet which eventually turns out to be sentient thanks to global networks of fungus which act as neurons. If the player is eco-friendly, they can eventually communicate with the planet and dump their citizens' consciousness into the seemingly-immortal planet. Even that would only delay the inevitable, but to quote the game's CEO Nwabudike Morgan:

>I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice.

Sound familiar, Thiel?

If you appreciate what the Gates foundation has done, consider that it's called the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

But that's just my anecdotal experience.

E pluribus unum. We stand together, or we fall apart. At least, figuratively...it's probably not a good idea to stand too close together at the moment.

Would that actually translate to decoding the process of turning abstract thoughts into words?

The researchers also note that their models are vulnerable to over-fitting because of the paucity of training data, and they only used a 250-word vocabulary. Neuralink also has a strong commercial incentive to inflate the results, so I'm not too sure about this.

It's great to see progress in these areas, but it seems that technologies like eye-tracking and P300 spellers are probably going to be more reliable and less invasive for quite some time.

They dry almost as soon as you take the heat off, which keeps parts from moving off their pads while it dries. And the iron doesn't seem to "pull" globs of the stuff around as much. I get really frustrated doing finicky work with leaded solders, but I'll happily do 0.5mm pitches by hand with lead-free.

Maybe it's just because I learned with the stuff?