The Truce, by Mario Benedetti. I was 13 or 14, and it’s the first time I cried while reading a book. I finished it seated on a park bench, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, maybe I’m really afraid about old age.

thank you for your service

yes. there’s two branching discussions here:

• Space as a scientific topic, it needs to be understood. Our observation of reality is very local, and although we can prove that some of our assumptions about physics, life and civilization work on our neighborhood, it doesn’t mean that they’re the same everywhere. That alone is sufficient reason for me, to explore.
• Space as the new frontier. Many if not all exploration done on planet Earth has been, in some shape or form, resource-motivated. Lands, food, medicine, minerals, routes, are all found through exploration and normally through people spending money looking for a return over investment. Space is no different.

I think the interesting part is where this two branches touch: If we ever plan on capturing an asteroid for mining, the technology needs to be there to do it, and hopefully the technology is about the benefit of all humankind. This kind of development is showing us the way to move forward and solve problems. Imagine a world when we don’t need to destroy ecosystems in order to get iron because all iron comes from off-world.

a good Stargate is a buried Stargate, or at least with a closed iris.

the link without the paywall

your argument is about etymology and meaning. I’m not defending anyone, but I’d say that it’s also wrong to have laws that point to actions against or for any race groups without also including a description of how does that description is applied in the context of the law. Meaning changes, language is fluid, and laws need to be updated.

In Chile, it’s a pretty common idiom to say “cachai?” after a sentence in the same way you’d say “you get me?”. it’s widely accepted that is comes from the verb “to catch”.

AM/PM requires you to change the value order of numbers in your mind: for the same calendar day, hours are, in order: 12-01-02-…-10-11 AM, 12-01-02-…-10-11 PM.

Mario Teaches Typing

was your first day difficult?

do it in exchange of a share of the profit. nothing turns people off like sharing.

get an early start on those babies

weirdest item you’ve found?

Did you buy a present for the person you love? Within cells interlinked.

it’s simple thermodynamics. critical thinking requires energy, calories that you’d rather use surviving. critical thinkers appear when their needs are externally covered because they have disposable energy.

this post could’ve been a tweet

I think you’re overestimating how much services care about retro-compatibility of clients. Try opening a YouTube video in the iPhone 6 app, you can’t, and not because the video is now incompatible, it’s because the old app has not been updated, and YouTube changed their API, so even if the software doesn’t change, services are not being provided to it. Same will happen to the Tesla app, Navigation, Netflix, everything that relies in external services to work. Sure, the car features will probably still work, but in the case of navigation, for example, even if it uses an offline database of maps and it calculates routes directly on the car’s hardware, new versions of the maps will not be available, or, routes might not be able to be calculated.

I wonder if in the future, installing your own software in the car will become illegal: given that car software can even control transmission, a car manufacturer could argue that it could compromise safety of the vehicle and pedestrians, an unsafe car framework could mean that someone can potentially program the car to accelerate when frontal sensors detect someone, to be a bit extreme, but don’t tell me its impossible.

what I’m saying is that there’s no path of thought and desire that goes “oh man, I feel so good that I want to celebrate by smoking this thing”, when you say that it starts socially, I wonder how much of the need one feels to smoke is derived from social pressure, anxiety at the thought of not fitting in, or fear of missing out, or simple boredom.