Living 20 minutes into the future. Eccentric weirdo. Virtual Adept. Time traveler. Thelemite. Technomage. Hacker on main. APT 3319. Not human. 30% software and implants. H+ - 0.4 on the Berram-7 scale. Furry adjacent. Pan/poly. Burnout. Cyberpunk but I don’t have enough hair left for a pink mohawk.
I don’t know anymore. “Companies” is the key word there. Depending on how far you want to go to hold to your values, you might have go all the way back to scratch building a RepRap.
Before anybody asks, no, I’m not being sarcastic. That might be what it takes these days.
And make a little money on the side.
https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2025-05-05/thinking-about-this-and-that/
I wish I could not confirm this, but I can.
I don’t expect to live long enough to retire. Any hope that I’d eventually be able to retire and enjoy life for a change went out the window in 2008 when the housing bubble popped.
I did not. Between the social backlash of Google Glass (c.f., what happened to Steven Mann in France about a decade ago) and the product being DV’d, I gave up on it and moved my research into cold storage.
I don’t think JWICS is DoD only. In theory, any TLA or FLA that handles TS material, has a SCIF and a local JWICS LAN can’t be hooked into the rest of the JWICS network.
I was writing code for Google Glass that implemented facial recognition. A friend of mine suffered a TBI in an automobile wreck and developed partial facial prosopagnosia as a result. I was basically writing software that would recognize faces within 15 feet of the wearer and compare it to images of their contacts in their Google account, and would throw up an AR subtitle identifying the person on a match. Not too long after I filed the developer applications and outlined my project, the Glass project flatlined.
I still don’t think I should have told them I was working on a software prosthetic for it.
Surprising no one who’s ever had to work with it for longer than sixty seconds.
NSA? Yes. CIA? Probably not. They don’t have that kind of imagination. c.f., the internal parody of The Hunt for Red October they declassified about a decade ago.
Google happened to it. Right when some of us started doing practical things with it. Still haven’t forgiven them for that.
Honestly? Not very.
I grew up in the 1980’s doing duck-and-cover drills in school until the Berlin Wall came down. Growing up a science nerd who practically lived at the library, it was pretty obvious that duck-and-cover would do jack-and-shit if anybody ever pressed the big red button. So, I had to come to terms with the possibility that somebody might nuke where I grew up, probably far too early than was good for my mental health.
What it comes down to is this: In the unlikely event that somebody pops off a nuclear weapon, there is precisely dick that you, I, or anybody else likely to read this thread could do about it. It’s way above any of our pay grades, to steal a phrase. The only thing you can really do is take heart in the fact that there is nothing you did to cause it and nothing you can do to stop it, just like a solar flare or a gamma ray burst. The best you can hope for is that you’re somewhere in the first two blast radii because the most likely outcome is a bright flash, and that’ll be that. No suffering, no radiation sickness, no cancer eating you alive months to years later.
I get that’s not the kind of response you’re looking for, and I can’t blame you for that. However, neither am I willing to lie. Nuclear war is possibly one of the most horrible things the human race is capable of, and there is no happy medium, nothing reassuring, nothing hopeful that can be said.
Hug your loved ones.