When I was quite young, I was given a hand-me-down watch with a glow in the dark dial. A local school had a science fair with a demonstration Geiger counter. The watch dial was nuclear: ZnS/Ra .

When I was young, on family evening drives through southeast Texas, one could hear about Jesus on AM in languages nobody at all understood: Holy Roller low power stations. Cajun stations also came through. Also, I am nostalgic for CONELRAD.

A few years ago at the beach, a guy came up and got into conversation. He had a specific look about him, which I tested with a piece of arcane vocabulary. He did not flinch. It then arose, as suspected, that he had a doctorate in particle physics. Later in the conversation, he announced that he was working on an app to find parking in San Francisco.

Thousands of unemployed IBM "EMERGENCY PULL" switches languish and weep for opportunity. Unfortunately, they are not up to the demands of a modern data center: Lugo disconnect

Remarkably clear and informative article, thank you.

"The team addressed this by making big, bold changes in strategy early in training and small, careful ones later" is interesting, because it sounds similar to simulated annealing. I wonder if they use a scalar "temperature" function, or something with more dimensions.

Who would not want to be recognized as a reincarnation of Nero, earning the description by Suetonius as "pustular and malodorous"?

Valorant sounds like a Hegspeth re-specification for military deodorant: "Smells like victory."

Today's accidental reflective truth award goes to the above prophet: "prophets would explode".

After visiting your ophthalmologist, because I wrote "60s", I recommend online archive copies of Edmund Berkeley's "Giant Brains, or Machines That Think", originally written in the 1949 electromechanical era, with 1961 addenda reflecting electronic advances. He has insightful observations, speculations, and war cautions on computing and robotics, and an extensive list of references across various disciplines. He raises the (vacuum tube) IBM 650 as an example of digital progress. When I was quite young, I was allowed to press the Start button on a 650 in the Texas state comptroller's facility.

Also Star Trek episode A taste of Armageddon where two planets conduct war simulations against each other, then send the simulation result number of actual victims into disintegration units.

The 1960s checks in with the adage: "To err is human. To really fuck things up requires a computer."

Ignorant and presumptive horseshit. A relative was a flight attendant. "Port" is a hotel on the airline's list for cost, transportation, and crew safety. Crew are there to try to get enough sleep to not be a passenger safety hazard.

Review your nation's Post Office Fujitsu scandal for a lesson on government contracting failures and malignant and deadly ass-covering.

Gebbia is a co-founder of AirBnB. When a relative dies, you will be charged a large cleaning fee for their government records transition.