The last Bolt model year was 2023 - you can’t really find new ones at dealer lots anymore. There is supposed to be a new version coming at some point, but no official details or timeframe yet.

Plenty of countries have national parks btw. Many of them had them before America.

Well not really though ? Yellowstone established in 1872 is generally considered the first national park, in the modern sense of the term*, and inspired others to follow in the next couple of decades in Canada, New Zealand and Australia. It wasn’t until the 1900s that the first national park was established in Europe.

* there are a couple of other places that also claim this distinction, depending on how exactly you define what a national park is, but not many

Calling national parks “America’s best idea” is a quote from historian and environmentalist Wallace Stegner - I think the point of it is not to toot some US exceptionalism horn - in context it’s more of an acknowledgment that America deserves a lot of criticism - saying that national parks are America’s best idea is actually putting a bit of shade on other American exceptionalism claims, especially during the Reagan “shining city upon a hill” era.

According to CBP’s own stats they conducted 42725 basic and 4322 advanced searches of electronic devices at US ports of entry last year (so before any new policies of the current administration took effect)

“Under a basic search, a border agent physically inspects your phone and reviews what they can, while an advanced search means the agent can potentially download all of your files using an external device.”

This is true, however you can still be targeted for extra checks by both customs and immigration if they have a reason to suspect you, even when departing the US. Both CBP and ICE have access to departing passenger lists.

For example you are required to declare larger sums of cash being carried out of the country (over $10k). You are supposed to go to customs and fill out a form, but many people do not know this, often legal immigrant workers taking cash back to their home countries. CBP uses dogs trained to smell cash and patrols departure lounges in airports, and if they pick you out, you can be searched, and any undeclared cash will simply be seized if found.

It’s easy to imagine with the current administration they could start targeting people based on social media posts or some kind of previously compiled political profile or “enemies” list or whatever, if they aren’t already.

It was the 90s… rules were different then ! I still have my white pants deep in the closet somewhere… they haven’t seen the light of day in a while though :)

I worked at Bell Labs back when this photo was taken - my office pretty much looked exactly like this, chair, furniture, Sun SPARCStation on the floor…

Bjarne still rocks white pants sometimes to this day though ! And the same haircut - he really committed to the look :)

For most citrus the pith has no flavor at all, definitely not bitter. Most people object to the texture and blandness/lack of flavor, which I can understand. I have a bunch of citrus trees in my yard, and learned to not mind the pith, mainly due to laziness (I eat a lot of oranges) - and it’s a good source of fiber.

Western diet is actually notoriously low on fiber and high in sugar, and the citrus pith is also high in vitamin C.

So for many people eating the pith would actually be a healthier choice - in the context of their low fiber/high sugar diet.

I first got on the Internet just as the shift from :-) to :) was happening, only geezers still used :-) and :) was the hip new thing…

Expat is short for expatriate, not ex-patriot. Both expatriate and patriot do come from the same Latin root (patria, fatherland) via French.

But yes, expatriate means someone who lives outside (ex) of their fatherland (patria) - can be used for both immigrant or emigrant, depending on context.

The word average is often used to mean mean, however it can be used less specifically - median is a type of average as well.

From Merriam-Webster definition of average:

1a) a single value (such as a mean, mode, or median) that summarizes or represents the general significance of a set of unequal values

Also, things like testosterone levels in a population usually follow a normal distribution, where both mean and median are the same, so the distinction is often meaningless for practical purposes

I think “popular” is stretching it here, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is dead now, and while Hurd is interesting, it has ways to go.

Alpine is actually popular, particularly as a lightweight host OS to run docker.

You can have a Linux distro without GNU -Alpine Linux is a popular example

Chinese is also not right - 正确的 (zhèngquè de) means “proper”

Left and Right as the sides are 左 (zuǒ) and 右 (yòu) - you can also add 邊 (biān) to each which means “side” to be more explicit, but they are also used separately in many contexts where the left/right meaning is needed.

The Chinese characters for 左 and 右 actually originated as pictograms of the left and right hand in the early forms of Chinese writing, but later forms both contain general “hand” component (𠂇) with components 工 and 口 added for differentiation

The first computer I used was a PDP-8 clone, which was a very primitive machine by today’s standards - it only had 4k words of RAM (hand-made magnetic core memory !) - you could actually do simple programming tasks (such as short sequences of code to load software from paper tape) by entering machine code directly into memory by flipping mechanical switches on the front panel of the machine for individual bits (for data and memory addresses)

You could also write assembly code on paper, and then convert it into machine code by hand, and manually punch the resulting code sequence onto paper tape to then load into the machine (we had a manual paper punching device for this purpose)

Even with only 4k words of RAM, there were actually multiple assemblers and even compilers and interpreters available for the PDP-8 (FOCAL, FORTRAN, PASCAL, BASIC) - we only had a teletype interface (that printed output on paper), no monitor/terminal, so editing code on the machine itself was challenging, although there was a line editor which you could use, generally to enter programs you wrote on paper beforehand.

Writing assembly code is not actually the same as writing straight machine code - assemblers actually do provide a very useful layer of abstraction, such as function calls, symbolic addressing, variables, etc. - instead of having to always specify memory locations, you could use names to refer to jump points/loops, variables, functions, etc. - the assembler would then convert those into specific addresses as needed, so a small change of code or data structures wouldn’t require huge manual process of recalculating all the memory locations as a result, it’s all done automatically by the assembler.

So yeah, writing assembly code is still a lot easier than writing direct machine code - even when assembling by hand, you would generally start with assembly code, and just do the extra work that an assembler would do, but by hand.

The kids always adapt though.

There is a strong survivorship bias in this though. Some kids do adapt, maybe even most, but many still are harmed, and have been by unhealthy exposure to radio, television, videogames, etc. in the past. Social media is even wreaking havoc in the older generations right now.

It’s easy to point at the survivors and the success stories and say see, there is nothing to worry about - but that’s also a bit like pointing at the lifelong smokers who do not get lung cancer as an argument against promoting non-smoking.