It's Not The Terminator. It's worse.
I used to think the idea of a robot apocalypse was stupid. (Stay with me, I promise this is going somewhere.) Not because AI isn’t potentially dangerous, but because the specific fantasy (Skynet wakes up, builds an army of chrome humanoids, declares war on humanity) skips about forty steps and gets basically everything wrong. Humanoid robots are hard to build, expensive to operate, and worse than humans at most of the things you’d actually want a weapon to do.
You Should Run an IRC Server
In 1995 I was nineteen years old. I had just learned what the internet was. Within about a week of that, I learned what IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was. I don’t think it’s possible to explain to someone who grew up with social media just how wild it felt to type something into a chat window and have a person in another country type something back. In real time. For free. It sounds quaint now, like telling someone you were amazed by a light switch.
The Reluctant Gunner
I enjoy target shooting.
There. I said it. I’m a pretty liberal person, and I just admitted that I enjoy going to a range, setting up a target, and putting holes in it with a handgun or an assault rifle. I find it satisfying in the same way I find any skill-based activity satisfying. It requires focus and patience and discipline.
I also think a lot of guns are genuinely beautiful objects. The engineering is remarkable when you look at it closely. The tolerances, the mechanics, the way all the parts interact. I can appreciate that without any cognitive dissonance, the same way I can appreciate the engineering of a modern fighter jet without wanting to go to war with a foreign country.
The Homepage Manifesto
There is a sound that comes out of a dial-up modem. If you’ve never heard it, imagine someone put R2-D2 in a burlap sack filled with angry weasels and then threw it down a flight of stairs. If you’re a Xennial, this sound was not only music, it signified the start of something we had to do intentionally: Go online. It was the first step in a process.