X on the fence post means the meeting is a go. O means we are compromised.

Also film cameras in pens and processing equipment.

USPS for coded messages and planning.

Watch/study Smileys People with Alec Guinness.

They expect AI to monitor everything 24/7.

I think they'll happily abandon the crappy Chevy Vega, Ford Pinto, Space Shuttle era wired infrastructure in our neighborhood just as soon as they have regulatory approval.

They are never going to dig up our streets, sidewalks, and front yards to install fiber.

There may be enough of us around to quickly establish ad-hoc communications networks in some catastrophe. I've got dozens of radios on hand and can build them myself if it comes to that.

I'm more worried that some degenerate government will be threatened by this.

Simply listening to foreign radio broadcasts in some times and places can get a person killed.

Although he is deeply involved with the digital world, he worries about our reliance on it.
He is also concerned that it is making deep changes in our consciousness, leading to a devolution in cultural norms.

One of the original universities on the network.

When fool-proofing software it's always convenient to have some fools around. I was one of the fools.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

It was using a text basd browser called Lyn8x if I remember it correctly. I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation. Content was very limited.

I remember attending a few discussions at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois and briefly chatting with Marc Andreesen, later co-founder of Netscape, who was still an undergraduate.

It never occurred to me that the internet would become a big deal and that people would get rich developing it, or even that I might build a career on it. At the time I was much more interested in supporting my wife's academic career, and then we had children.

I had an ex-girlfriend who did get rich recognizing the internet's potential but that was a relationship made in hell and I probably wouldn't have survived the ride. I broke up with her by jumping out of her moving car.

The first web browser I used almost daily was Lynx, which was released in 1992. I was still using it frequently when I first signed onto DU since I was sill most comfortable on the so-called command line. For browsing DU itself I used Opera.

I'm not familiar with the DEC operating systems proper. Mostly I was fooling around with BSD, DRDOS, and Atari 8 bit stuff.

My wife and I met as science teachers in a big urban school district.

I guess it was crypto and DEI.

Was he always that way?

It was always disappointing when they turned out to be idiot libertarians, Evangelical Christian Creationists, Reagan voters, white supremacists, or worse.

In Illinois at that time and in that setting I felt like an alien. My own background was Hollywood Liberal by my parents, leftist University of California by education, and Quaker / Social Justice Warrior Catholic pacifist by indoctrination.

Judging by the way Andreessen turned out I'd guess that he was Libertarian. By his later support of Democrats he correctly ascertained that, by the numbers, Republicans were bad for business and not so good for personal liberties either.

A lot of these "Techno_Optimist" Libertarians are now in a complete panic as they realize their utopian visions were never viable. Rather than accepting this reality gracefully they are blaming others for their failures.

so I’ve avoided politics with coworkers.

Of course, my acquaintances haven’t included VCs and CEOs. There’s been a lot of talk about the libertarian/ right wing shift in Silicon Valley over the last few years, especially prior to the previous election. I’m curious if it will hold. There’s undoubtably always been a libertarian bent to SV, but I think any whisper of industry regulations made them lose their mind.

I was a Navy signalman when they still had them. Ask me anything. haha

We had butt cans everywhere. Stashed in corners. Found a doob/roach in one once. My lucky day.

There won’t be any communication backup when the power grid goes down.

Well yes, it is.

AI overview tells me, “The phrase "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" refers to a famous 2008 article by Nicholas Carr that argues the internet and Google's easy access to information may be reducing our ability to concentrate, think deeply, and retain information. Carr argues that the internet's fragmented nature encourages skimming and shallow processing, leading to a decline in our cognitive capacity for contemplation and deep reading.”

And social media empowers stupid people to join and sometimes to dominate the national conversation. It is democratization but it also seems to be social suicide, because some social media algorithms reinforce the Dunning-Kruger effect. Stupid people know they're right.