Na: I will BURN you! You put me in water, I WILL DESTROY THE WATER.

Cl: You can’t even be near me! I will get into your lungs and DESTROY them!

NaCl: I will make your food taste better unless you use TOO MUCH OF ME AND THEN IT WILL TASTE BAD AND YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE WILL GO UP A BIT!

It’s definitely cool to see when you get into Western Pennsylvania, for example.

Java is a better fit. It hasn’t fallen in popularity the way PHP has. But, I’m not convinced that serious backend services mostly use Java. It’s one of the languages used, sure. But, I don’t know if it beats C/C++ or Go. Apache’s C. Nginx is C. Kubernetes is Go. Docker is Go.

I think Java has a niche with certain kinds of business logic applications, and those are pretty common. I would guess that in a typical set of interactions with a Google product, or a Meta product, or an AWS product, some parts of the traffic will be handled by services written in Java. But, others will be C/C++ or Go. There will probably also be some parts of the process that are PHP or Ruby or Python, and a lot of Javascript.

Where I live, I still see people in a horse-drawn wagon. So, I guess horse-drawn wagons never died? It’s only used for tourists and weddings, but that counts, right?

According to Tiobe, PHP was the programming language of the year in 2004. In 2010 it was number 3 in the top 10 programming languages. It’s now out of the top 10 entirely. There really isn’t a language that has completely disappeared. Mainframes are still programmed using COBOL, Scientists are still using FORTRAN, even Lisp, which has been around since the 1950s, is still going strong.

Maybe Actionscript counts as truly dead, since it was tied to Adobe Flash, and Flash is truly dead?

I have a lot of bad memories of PHP. It was, for a brief time, the main language I used, but it was so ugly and inconsistent. The only thing I loved about it, at the time, was that it wasn’t Visual Basic. As bad as PHP was, at least I wasn’t making web pages in that pile of hot garbage. But, I never felt joy writing something in PHP. At best it was a slog. At worst it was like pulling teeth.

Just about every other language has given me moments of fun. Original Javascript was a mess, but it already contained scheme-like features. It was sold as being an interpreted version of Java, but it had features that Java wouldn’t have for at least a decade. C is a brutal and unforgiving language, but as long as you’re not working with strings, it’s great to have such low-level control over everything.

Maybe PHP has evolved like other languages, but I still am not interested in trying it out. Everything it was good at can be done better by other languages, and those are languages that give me joy, not pain. I hope it keeps dropping in the rankings so that people aren’t exposed to it as one of their first languages.

Epstein was probably very useful for whatever purpose he served to Donny

Sure, but have you seen the video of Trump talking into Epstein’s ear while the two were watching cheerleaders or something. That scene genuinely seemed to be one where he was treating Epstein as a friend. I’m not sure how much Epstein thought of Trump as a friend, but it did really look like Trump wanted Epstein to be his friend at that point.

I agree that he mostly doesn’t have friends because he sees everyone as tools to be used and discarded. That’s probably how most of them view him too, like Musk. But, I wouldn’t be surprised if Epstein was one of the few people he viewed as a friend. He knew him for at least 15 years, and with most people he’d have discarded them already.

So Donny sending a card doesn’t necessarily imply a close friendship like you would expect with a typical person.

The sad thing is that Trump’s friendship with Epstein really does seem to be one of the closest / only friendships of his adult life.

You mean like doodling things and signing them?

and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair

How long until the marching order to the MAGA influencers is: “Well, there’s proof that Trump isn’t a pedophile, if he was, why would he be doodling pubic hair?! Case Closed!”

Cool

Epstine?

Imagine how much exercise he could get if he walked while playing golf rather than riding carts.

Are you saying that they lied about his health!? Say it ain’t so!

We know he’s 6’3" and 224 pounds with a resting heartbeat of 62 bpm. How could he possibly have health problems?

but what if 2/3rds of the government decides to wipe their ass with the constitution at the same time

Or just, “what if a party works together and falls in line under a single leader”?

It should have been obvious not that this was possible, but that it was inevitable.

The only way I can see to do anything about that flaw is to just make it ridiculously easy to impeach any politician, say something like a general vote of the public that only requires a 25% margin to pass

If that happened, seats would be constantly vacant. You’d have 75% D districts with a 25% R minority who would simply remove anybody the other side elected. The D’s would retaliate by removing a R. The oligarchs would love that system because there would be nobody to pass laws that stopped their looting.

The fundamental problem is democracy.

Giving every single person a vote, no matter what, is a problem. Weighing every single vote equally, no matter what, is a problem. The GOP won because there were enough people who had lost touch with reality that their lies were believable. And, now that they won, they’re going to rig the game even more, and make sure that there are no limits put on disinformation.

Democracy may be the best system we have found so far, but it has some severe failure modes.

How many of the other 75% wishes they could eat their meals alone?

Everything I hate is cultural marxism.

Which makes titles like “Her Worship” and “Honourable” such bullshit. We should really just get rid of those titles.

To me, the physics of the situation makes this all the more impressive.

Voyager has a 23 watt radio. That’s about 10x as much power as a cell phone’s radio, but it’s still small. Voyager is so far away it takes 22.5 hours for the signal to get to earth traveling at light speed. This is a radio beam, not a laser, but it’s extraordinarily tight beam for a radio, with the focus only 0.5 degrees wide, but that means it’s still 1000x wider than the earth when it arrives. It’s being received by some of the biggest antennas ever made, but they’re still only 70m wide, so each one only receives a tiny fraction of the power the power transmitted. So, they’re decoding a signal that’s 10^-18 watts.

So, not only are you debugging a system created half a century ago without being able to see or touch it, you’re doing it with a 2-day delay to see what your changes do, and using the most absurdly powerful radios just to send signals.

The computer side of things is also even more impressive than this makes it sound. A memory chip failed. On Earth, you’d probably try to figure that out by physically looking at the hardware, and then probing it with a multimeter or an oscilloscope or something. They couldn’t do that. They had to debug it by watching the program as it ran and as it tried to use this faulty memory chip and failed in interesting ways. They could interact with it, but only on a 2 day delay. They also had to know that any wrong move and the little control they had over it could fail and it would be fully dead.

So, a malfunctioning computer that you can only interact with at 40 bits per second, that takes 2 full days between every send and receive, that has flaky hardware and was designed more than 50 years ago.