One one hand, it's political news, which I abhor on HN. On the other hand, international travel out of SF provides underlying support for the tech industry and without it, would cause deep headaches. On balance then, yeah, I don't mind this on HN.
Yeah, we got sucked into the hopefulness, the promise and the excitement of a new technology. It was a great feeling and primarily one of optimism. I remember being blown away by the promise of HyperCard when I first read about it.
That promise and excitement didn't last long but it kept me employed. And the optimism certainly went south.
I certainly don't condone the experience I had in junior high school, although it seemed to work for our specific environment.
As a child I went to a well funded Catholic school in Chicago. Fighting was discouraged by priests who would put the two kids in a boxing ring - we were made to use gloves (but I don't remember helmets). Both kids would have a priest in their corner, but really for their own amusement. Then they would ring the bell and the two combatants would have at it.
What those who don't box don't know is that unless you are trained, boxing exhausts you almost immediately and the gloves very quickly become so heavy you can hardly lift them to punch. At the end of the first round, the priests would ask us if we wanted to continue, we would exhaustedly decline.
My only introduction to the ring ended with my opponent becoming a best friend, and most bouts ended the same.
Again, I'm not condoning this practice, and I'm not nostalgic about the period, but it seemed to have positive effects in a milieu that seems no longer to exist (I'm 73).
I can recommend A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. Heartily recommend in fact.
And if you're like me, always looking for a series to fill the time, I can recomend the Solar Clipper series by Nathan Lowell. It's nothing dramatic, just human interactions, which I found refreshing.
It didn't grab me at first but your comment makes me think I should give it another go, thanks. I remember that initially I had a world of trouble with Conrad's Heart of Darkness but I hit it again and was amply rewarded, so Ill give Blindsight another try, thanks.
It seems that low quality human customer support, or rather, no support at all, has been normal for some time. I don't enjoy talking to an AI, but if they are constructed to be efficiently helpful, I welcome it, grudgingly.
Almost every “call tree” I’ve needed to navigate has seemed designed to prevent customer escalation to a human at all costs, despite not meeting my needs as a caller. In this way they are user hostile, and I expect the new technology to be used similarly to much greater effect.
That being said, if the technology can remove the need for human escalation, I’ll certainly change my view.
In my personal experience, a divorce, money (child support), if I couldn't change it, I'd ignore it. But to ignore my own adversity, I had to intensely focus on something else, typically a new interest or hobby. I dove into medieval history, and now have a suberb library on on the topic - the reading and the collecting books both informed me and kept my mind off the troubles I couldn't avoid. And I dove into baseball which to be honest, broke my heart but baseball despair is an infinitly more palatable despair than love loss.
It might have been 2002, can't remember, when they upgraded the e-QIP software for the security check form.
I was doing my mandatory update coincidental with the roll-out and when I got to the question, "mother a US citizen" I had to check the "no" box and the immediate pop-up was "date of first contact?" which actually got me thinking along existential lines for a moment.
