After a while though, particularly on flakey connections, I end up with dozens of stale mosh sessions on each server, all listening for inbound connections that will never come.

The quickest way to clear them seems to be pkill mosh and then reconnect. It's a known bug with no anticipated fix.

> it was named from our point of view.

Actually it was named from the perspective of Spanish explorers. Originally Gulf of New Spain but by 1569 had become Gulf of Mexico.

On-demand scaling is still a feature of zSeries mainframes, now called Elastic Capacity on Demand .

To non-corporates it might look like wasted resources or gouging the users, but from the enterprise perspective it's a marvellous feature. It's basically on-premises cloud-scaling.

The number of Starlink satellites and the rapidity of their replenishment vastly outnumbers the number of ASAT interceptors, and launchers, that any nation could produce.

Shooting-down Starlink satellites is economically infeasible, never mind the fratricide it would cause to the aggressor's own LEO assets.

True, but it would still be a very expensive inconvenience for SpaceX, I think enough that it isn't worth serving roaming users there and pissing off the countries.

> there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.

Both the Cessna Citation TEN and the Bombardier Global 8000 were taken supersonic during test flights, as they have to demonstrate stability at speeds of M0.07 greater than max cruise.

They aren't certificated to do it in service, but structurally and aerodynamically have no problem.

Long-range business jets have been pushing aeronautical boundaries well beyond the mundane airliner state-of-the-art.

> and post 9/11 ...

Two-thirds of BA's Concorde regular passengers died on 9/11. The service never recovered financially from that loss.

Thats a very interesting observation. Do you have a link with more details?

I can see 2/3 quit flying, but died? Seems unlikely.

It's strange to see the naivety around Reader.

If Facebook had created it, people would recognise the initiative to gate-keep, regulate and curate the Wild West of RSS. "They're trying to keep you inside their walled garden!"

Reader made tons of people use RSS who otherwise wouldn’t, and who now don’t.

It did not live long enough to become a villain (though it certainly would have — there is no reason why G wouldn’t have added recommendations, an algo feed, and all it brings). Therefore it’s remembered well.

> Reader died because people were switching to social media.

Which especially sucks, because its friend-of-a-friend model for making comments visible on shared items was better for discovering interesting people, constructively limiting the social impact of popular posts, reducing the dangers of unintentionally poor posts, and disincentivizing trolling than any social network has implemented since.

For the few people who even knew Reader had a social network—a group which certainly didn't include Google—it was a better social network than any of the ones credited with killing it.

I think it was just as much that the people who wrote blogs were switching to writing in the walled gardens of social media as it was the consumers. But yeah, I greatly prefer the days of blogs and RSS readers.

Now you have Substack and Medium and such, which are pretty decent.

The Fediverse is a bit like that. Anyone can post replies on things, but they don't spread through the whole network, only to people who are following the replier, and people on the replier's server, and the person who posted the thing being replied to.

It doesn’t seem to work quite like that. I don’t know the technical details, but I definitely see replies from people I don’t follow, from other instances, on posts of people I don’t follow on different (again) instances from mine and the replies.

Perhaps it could be that I’m seeing replies from people that others on my instance follow? Or perhaps there’s some other mechanism to fetch replies.

Probably that. Actually if your server receives the reply for any reason, it displays it, usually. There isn't a mechanism to fetch replies, so this is a kind of accidental filtering, while ATproto is the opposite and tries to make everything globally visible.

I use my own server with only me, so it only receives replies because I'm following the person who replied or their whole-server feed.

> Reader also had no vendor lock in at all. There’s no network effect like Facebook.

Reader had a massive social graph and strong network effects. There were social feeds that only existed in Reader and vanished when Reader shut down. I know I had friends that didn't blog but curated fascinating social feeds in Reader based on how widely they read. There were shared comments that only existed in Reader and entire discussions that happened in the margins of feeds that were lost.

Those social feeds were a discoverability joy. You'd find new feeds for yourself. You'd encourage friends to follow feeds you most recommended. None of the replacements have ever quite felt the same. (I love Newsblur, and it has versions of most of those social features, but it has never had the network effect, and probably never will.)

At one point too, the feeds in Reader included full histories up until the date someone first added the feed to Reader. You could scroll back through time "forever" on some feeds all the way to their first posts, sometimes posts that even the site itself had deleted since (and still read Reader-only comments on them). RSS feeds generally only provide the most recent dozen or so posts. Reader was tracking everything. That was a massive infrastructure demand in the Google scale that just about only Google could have done. None of the replacements try, and generally only keep about 45-90 days of feed activity.

Sure, it wasn't a completely walled garden, like Facebook, but it's still a case of Google killing the largest social network it had with the most beloved network effects for a marginal increase in vendor lock-in. They had good vendor lock-in that few could have competed with, and the replacements today are still scored on how much they can't compete with it, despite matching features.

Reader died because Google was switching to social media, not because people did.

> It would have been hard to make that product evil.

You can just treat RSS data as content to bring in new users, while building your lock through other means. Sharing, recommendations, algo feeds, commenting, and, eventually, posting. Then apply demands to RSS feeds, leveraging your audience, and lock out new ones.

This is all very easy and the playbook is well understood at this point.

This is just completely untrue.

It’s possible social media could have killed Reader.

But Reader died because Google killed anything that wasn’t directly contributing to Google+, and Reader was competition to Google+.

Also, I doubt Reader would have lost to social media. If Reader had stuck around it would most likely have been a Twitter alternative.

It was from a time where Google's ethos was still "Don't be evil" and generally speaking the naked greed triggered by AdSense hadn't infected the rest of the company yet.

So I think a lot of nostalgia is not just for the reader but also for the company Google used to be.

I wonder if in 20 years time there will be the next generation of programmers sneering over vapour-ware Google products while middle managers still buy them products because "no-one ever got fired for buying Google".

Because we miss what Reader was and not what it could have become.

As a more prolific blog writer at the time I also liked that their bot would include number of people who were subscribed to my blog in their User Agent.

> As a more prolific blog writer at the time I also liked that their bot would include number of people who were subscribed to my blog in their User Agent.

Something I generally appreciate with Google: The level of craftsmanship and the amount of elegant designs like this they come up with. (There are also… other things, but their standards are high compared to many competitors.)

These were different times, people hadn't burned themselves on Embrace, extend, and extinguish that much yet.

That’s not how I remember Reader at all.

I never used the web interface.

Google Reader provided syncing for nearly every 3rd party RSS app.

It wasn’t just a walled garden. It was also critical infrastructure for most RSS apps at the time.

I'll credit them for Windows NT, that was a solid system ( though developed mainly by ex-DEC staff ).

SQL Server was originally licensed from Sybase.

"In a time of mutual assured destruction"

I do wish that myth would die. All nuclear players during the Cold War intended to "win" at nuclear war fighting; MAD was never a doctrine.

In fact MAD was popularised by McNamara to mock the concept!

Here's an excerpt of McNamara's famous speech in San Francisco, 1967.

> The cornerstone of our strategic policy continues to be to deter nuclear attack upon the United States or its allies. We do this by maintaining a highly reliable ability to inflict unacceptable damage upon any single aggressor or combination of aggressors at any time during the course of a strategic nuclear exchange, even after absorbing a surprise first strike. This can be defined as our assured-destruction capability.

> Security depends upon assuming a worst plausible case, and having the ability to cope with it. In that eventuality we must be able to absorb the total weight of nuclear attack on our country -- on our retaliatory forces, on our command and control apparatus, on our industrial capacity, on our cities, and on our population -- and still be capable of damaging the aggressor to the point that his society would be simply no longer viable in twentieth-century terms. That is what deterrence of nuclear aggression means. It means the certainty of suicide to the aggressor, not merely to his military forces, but to his society as a whole.

https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/deterrence...

----

McNamara used the term "assured destruction" over and over again it became a cornerstone of his policy. Later a civilian added an "M" to MAD, and the term caught on.

Here's an interview transcript from much later, in 1987:

INT: Much has been made during this period of the term 'MAD', Mutually Assured or..

RM: Yes..

INT: ......Destruction. Can you explain what was meant by that?

RM: It's not mad! (laugh) Mutual Assured Destruction is the foundation of deterrence.

RM: Today it's a derogative term , but those that denigrate it don't understand deterrence. If you want a stable nuclear world -- if that isn't an oxymoron -- , to rephrase it, to the degree one can achieve a stable nuclear world, it requires that each side be confident that it can deter the other.

Nuclear Folly, a book on the Cuban Missile Crisis by Serhii Plokhy makes and interesting point, the Nuclear Age came before the Information Age.

The consequences of this were very nearly catastrophic, as the speed at which communication occurred was just so slow, with intel and news coming in so very very slowly. Discussions were being made in the dark and were outdated or based on outdated incorrect assumption.

I think there was considerably more luck than we’d like in the ‘system’ we engineered.

Yeah, I prefer this "when this comment is XY old" format the most when communicating internationally. Closely followed by UTC, of course.

I hate having to convert from some time zone which I don't know by heart; with the additional risk of getting daylight savings or something wrong and missing the event.