Yeah, I tell myself this every time I remember clicking "Cancel" on Ameritrade and deciding not to buy Apple stock in 1995. I probably would've sold when it doubled, thinking myself very clever. I wouldn't still have it today.
I think it's cyclical. Punk in the early 80s was a reaction to the excesses of 70s superbands (e.g. Johnny Rotten's "I hate Pink Floyd" t-shirt). Then things built up again to "monsters of rock" arena tours, The Spice Girls, and hair bands before getting torn down again by the likes of Nirvana.
(Hell, rock and roll was born as an anti-establishment thing in the 1950s)
Maybe we're just due for another one of the inflection points where being anti-cool will become cool again.
Ok, the Spice Girls were formed 1994, the same year Kurt Cobain died, but Take That and lots of other boy/girl bands and other extremely commercial pop acts were contemporary with Nirvana and the whole grunge phenomenon. So it's not cyclical, it's actually two sides of the same medal. There are to this day still lots of bands that hold their "indie ethos" high, the only thing different in the 1990s was that some of those indie/alternative bands were actually successful enough to be considered (shudder) mainstream...
> There are to this day still lots of bands that hold their "indie ethos" high, the only thing different in the 1990s was that some of those indie/alternative bands were actually successful enough to be considered (shudder) mainstream...
The late 80s to early 2000s was a distribution sweet-spot for groups like that.
Early MTV didn't always line up with what mainstream radio played, but gave more new artists opportunities. This continued up at least through Eminem getting his breakout in that way - I wouldn't say he shunned fame, but until breaking through with a music video there the radio machine wasn't giving him that fame. Tapes, and later CD burners, also massively accelerated word-of-mouth for stuff that wasn't the immediate first choice for top-40 format radio stations because it let more people share more things. Then you had the internet/napster era supercharge that. "It Wasn't Me" by Shaggy became a huge hit because a local DJ in Hawaii found it on Napster and started playing it.
Now we've crossed a tipping point where there's more indie stuff available than ever, but also so much personalized listening where it's getting harder again to get Nirvana-level famous outside of the system. But a Chappel Roan still fits the bill pretty well. Did you have lesbian dance-pop with 80s camp on your bingo card for massive mainstream popularity a few years ago?
I’ve already sunk hundreds of hours into building out the fidelity of QuickBASIC (everything down to emulating memory access so you can simulate realistic PEEKing and POKEing), so I don’t have the sanity points left to tackle any other variants myself, but I’d love to see a GW-BASIC version.
Sounds like pcbasic, that implements GW-BASIC in python, both with a SDL GUI and a TUI, and it contains a partial PC emulator to make it possible to peek and poke some addresses and such. Impressive project, well documented and seems stable and nothing obvious is missing.
Haha same. I definitely crashed our family's PC quite a few times as a kid by forgetting to set the segment address to &HA000 and then poking, mistakenly assuming I was hitting mode 13h VGA memory.
What's weird is that they did an open-source release of GWBASIC, but it seemed to be in a worse state than the DOS 1/2/4 releases. I don't think there's a turnkey distribution out there outside of digging up your old DOS 4.01 floppies.
There are some binary releases there from 2022, but I did not try those. The binary I built from source has worked very well.
Never tried to build the DOS source, but I really enjoyed playing with the toolchain they included with the MS-DOS 4 source code release. It's pretty much a complete, MIT-licensed (but binary only) Microsoft toolchain (msc, masm, make, link, etc) from ~1988. For some of my recent hobby projects I put that toolchain in my git repos, to have everything self-contained, with DOSBox as a virtual machine both for building and running, and no other dependencies. So I am happy Microsoft released the DOS code, even if I did not look much at the code itself.
I'm sure they already are. Can you imagine how much health insurance companies would luv to get their hands on such data? How much they would be willing to pay?
Main problem with that is that 90% of us are on group plans and the insurance company doesn’t get to know who’s in the group when they price the premiums for your employer, and on the (Obamacare) individual plans they can only use broad things like age, etc.
If that changes, there’s still the problem that they would have to disclose it, and when people notice, they’d be sure to avoid the restaurant where eating there increases your insurance premiums!
maybe they start by not adjusting your rates based on your habits, but just nagging you.
Aetna already notices when I don't pick up my prescriptions on time and emails me about it. So I could imagine a dystopian future where the insurance company makes you install an app instead of using an insurance card (or at least makes this the default/easier), and the app sends you a push notification when it senses you're too close to a McDonald's and says "Do you really need that double cheeseburger? It's your third one this week! (and Apple Health says your heart rate ain't looking so great)"
I know there are a zillion reasons this couldn't happen exactly like that now, (e.g., you'd have to give permission for all of this) but how far off is it?
There are a lot of subtle bugs. I'm on macOS too, but perhaps my workflow is unusual? Every time I open it, I find small bugs. There are so many features that it's hard to maintain them, I guess.
For example, a lot of disable buttons do not actually disable stuff. They just hide it from the UI.
Here's yet another anecdote of near-zero real value to add to the pile: I treated my severe treatment-resistant depression with ketamine infusions. It's obviously not the same as psilocybin, but I believe the current thinking is that psychoelics and dissociatives both have some positive effect on neuroplasticity, and that sorta checks out in my case. I'd say you need to combine it with some good cognitive behavioral therapy - it seemed to make CBT a lot more effective for me where it failed in the past because my brain was more open to rewiring. I haven't been re-treated in a few years now, but I still feel a lot better.
But you're also totally right - my story is just an anecdote, and these sort of headlines that used to have cannabis as a miracle cure for all types of things seem to have been replaced with headlines about psilocybin (or occasionally, ketamine) curing everything instead. I totally get the skepticism, but I'm a believer that we might be onto something w/r/t depression or other things that are treatable via CBT at least - the article mentioned "combined with talk therapy" ... not sure what therapy method was used alongside the psilocybin.
People tend to view these things as "pop the drug, and you're cured" but if you really want to make the most of the neuroplasticity, you need to make a conscious plan ahead of time so that you can guide the trip and focus on the problems you're genuinely facing.
The drug won't magically give you the answer but you may reach some more profound general breakthroughs regarding your own behavior, patterns you fall into unconsciously, etc.
Similar to how addiction and associated behaviors are really only resolved when the person addicted decides to make the change, you can use these to influence into a similar state.
Yes, for me it felt like the substance facilitates it so you do the mental work and introspection, allowing you the capacity to slow down and think through things, which won't miraculously happen if you aren't in a proper headspace.
I'm pretty sure that this sort of thing happens for stuff in big box home improvement stores like Home Depot and Lowe's, too. Things like plumbing fixtures that appear to be identical to counterparts in smaller stores will have off-by-one or suffixed product numbers, and are made with cheaper plastic internal parts than when purchased elsewhere.
