Railroad maintenance carts were replaced by trucks years ago, but a group of people have saved these rail little carts and still have events to ride the rails.
At Christmas they now make a run between small coastal towns to deliver presents.
Beware. Some day your kids may start treating you the way you treated them when they were younger.
After all, they’ll do what you teach them by your actions – not your words.
In another sad year of killing people with ‘kindness’, Portland Oregon has had another record year of dead in the streets. The data on 2024 homeless deaths was just released and reported 372 homeless found dead on sidewalks and in city ditches.
If you want to know if your public health policy is working – you should measure it. The metrics here show that once Oregon legalized drug use, legalized camping, and provided free referrals and free drug treatment options – deaths went from around 80 per year to over 370. That’s going from around 1 death a week to more than one a day. How much is supposed compassion worth when jail did a much better job saving lives than the well meaning but misguided free drug use kits, drug legalization, free tents, and enablement?
Meanwhile, the city leaders pat themselves on the back because it’s just 22 less deaths than 2023.
St. André Bessette Catholic Church (a place I have volunteered at many times) will hold a memorial service for homeless that died due to Portland’s policies on Dec. 21.
Toyark reports on Master Replicas photos and details on their new 2001: A Space Odyssey HAL 9000 Computer Replica.
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back
Hunter S Thompson 1971
Hunter S Thompson became a figure of a generation with gonzo journalism and cemented himself as an early icon of drug fueled antics. He wrote about the world of the late 60’s through 90’s with his unique lens that saw past the veneer and comedically revealed the absurdity of modern culture by his wild antics and fantastic writing.
He is famous for his mantra, “Buy the ticket, take the ride” which meant to fully commit to an experience or path once you’ve started, even if it gets intense or goes off the rails. The inherent risks and unpredictable outcomes are part of the journey for growth and having intense experiences.
Many, including Johnny Knoxville, got a lot their own motivation from him and here reflects his impressions of Hunter before took his own life. I think he nails it when he says, ““The persona he backed himself up into […] it cost him.”
I found some of the viewer comments to be powerful and true. Here’s a particularly great one:
I was obsessed with Hunter S. Thompson when I was in my late teens, early 20s. Eventually, I reached an age where I continued to appreciate his contributions to literature, but started to realize that it was a mistake to revere him as some sort of hero. When he took his own life, that only cemented the position. I think it was his sheer talent that papered over the fact that his ‘buy the ticket, take the ride’ philosophy is an utterly selfish and broken way to go about life.
But this is what we do… we mistake eloquence for truth and wrongly convince ourselves that there’s a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. And for the author himself, what kind of mindfuck must it be when, seemingly, the whole world celebrates and mythologizes your most destructive instincts? You’ve got guys like Johnny Depp, John Cusack, and Sean Penn worshipping you like a guru… I mean, how are you supposed to get off that treadmill?
You wonder if their romanticized view of him, as well as his philosophy, stood in the way of actually getting him help.
@tommy2159
I think this user, and Knoxville, see the truth. Living just for wild experiences is something many of us do in our 20’s. But it runs out. I have done and seen a crazy amount of interesting things in my time. I used to seek out lots of unique experiences and activities. But eloquence and excitement are not necessarily truth. Instead, as I have learned over the years, real truth shows itself in the outcomes and results: and the result most associated with truth? Peace. Especially a deep, abiding peace within yourself.
All of this made me think about a pattern I see happening in the software industry in 2024-2025. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and countless game/web companies have all had big layoffs and I’ve witnessed many professional friends get hit. After an amazing 20 year career, Intel has laid off a great number of people that absolutely defined computing in the 90’s and 2000’s.
Many people that are laid off often experience shock, then anger or sadness, and then fear about the future. What’s interesting is that both laid off people, and people who retire, also report feeling another thing: the loss of identity or sense of purpose. It paralyzes some to the point they are left in confusion, stuck in the past, stuck with anger, or unable to move on.
Johnny Knoxville thinks Hunter S Thompson made himself a persona. Many rock stars and movie stars make themselves a persona. But they’re not the only ones. Many professionals make themselves a persona – often referred to as your ‘personal branding’. Some people define themselves by being a mom/dad, or their traits like ‘the happy one of the group’. I think many people at Intel made themselves a persona as world-class leaders or engineers. The problem with personas are that people cling to them even when it becomes clear it’s killing them or destroying their happiness or relationships. Or even worse, these personas are all based on things that are temporary and very easily lost. Job titles and possessions can be stripped with the simple words, “You’re fired”.
I give Knoxville credit, he seems to have realized he created a persona that was destructive. It appears he, and others from Jackass, have worked hard for years now to get away from those personas.
The question is – can we see and walk away from our personas? Ask yourself: how do I define myself? Is it my job or company I work for? Is it being a spouse/mother/father? Is it the things we own? The skills we have (driver, climber, pilot, etc)? Could I lose those things and still know who I am?
I would challenge us all to really look at that. I did as it was becoming clear my time at Intel likely wasn’t going to last long. It gave me time to see exactly what parts of me were still clinging to that persona. What if I left my job or got fired? What happens when my children move away and have their own lives? What happens when my spouse passes away? Do I still know who I am?
For me, it was a fantastic invitation to go deeper into prayer and my connection with God. As things got rougher and rougher, I leaned more of my identity into who *He* told me I was, and I found myself less trapped by who *I* thought I was.
If you are struggling, I cannot urge you enough to turn to prayer in this time before Christmas. Not just haphazard prayer while driving or formulaic prayer; but pour out your heart and sit in prolonged silence with God. Go to a half hour of adoration. Spend some time this Advent listening. Let God tell you who you are. Troubles will always come – they did for Jesus. But when you know you’re following and living with God who intensely loves you, you do not get trapped by your personas. You instead get enveloped by the one that sees you as a intensely loved child by the creator of the universe.
Instead of parenting by strict rule enforcement, psychiatrist dad Richard Wadsworth opts for something called incentivized autonomy. In order to get screen time, his teens have a chore list they must complete first. They are free to do the items whenever they want – including getting up early at 6:30am to do a workout so they can have more time later. This teaches his kids how to make their own choices for the goals they want and regulate their own behaviors and emotions instead of having to have behaviors regulated or enforced on them. It creates exactly the kind of things kids need to develop to be successful in life: healthy self autonomy. They are learning the ability to be successful on their own. It naturally teaches consequences and they directly see the rewards of their behaviors.
I’ll admit it was something I started doing with myself when I had more time: I have to do my morning exercise before logging in for the day.
I got my start in programming with type-in BASIC programs. Back in the 80’s, almost every computer had BASIC built-in, but almost no kid could afford games. Or even get them – the nearest store that sold software from me was over 30 miles away. Mail order took 2-3 weeks. On top of that – kids are notoriously broke. What I did have was a library, and plenty of time.
Enter Compute! magazine. After ravenously devouring all the programming books our small Carnegie library had, I branched into magazines. BYTE was too news oriented and didn’t have type-in programs; though reading about the technology was fun. When I found Compute! – I was hooked. I eventually checked out just about every single magazine they had a dozen times over. I remember digging in the downstairs old issue stacks in search of any I might not have seen. I spent whole weekend afternoons typing the programs in – and then even more hours debugging each line to figure out where I’d gone wrong.
Nate Anderson recently wrote an article about those early days of type-in programs. Even more fun is the comments section full of people sharing their similar experiences.
With the internet and instantly available content and content development tools – it makes me wonder how the next generation’s engineers will develop. How will the instantly available world of free software and tools shape them compared to our generation of type-in programmers?
Thankfully, all these wonderful magazine scans have been saved in the Compute! Magazine Archive on the Internet Archive. I even sat down and typed one in (well – heavily utilized OCR as well!). What a blast.
My humble website rarely gets more than a hundred or so visitors a day, but I recently posted a Defcon talk video link and summary about the impending quantum computing security crisis. Just summarizing and linking to the video had an immediate and shocking effect. My site got overrun with thousands of hits overnight:
And where were all those people coming from?
Interesting.
“Don’t be so open minded your brain falls out”
When the poster child of quirky liberality calls your BS out, maybe you should listen? On a recent visit to Portland, David Sedaris got very little sympathy when he experienced the same thing many of us living here do every day. One of the increasingly rampant unleashed dogs belonging to a homeless person attacked and bit him.
How did Portlander’s respond to his bandaged leg? Victim shaming:
“You have to understand that these addicts, especially those with an opioid-use disorder, lead incredibly difficult lives,” the first person I spoke to, a woman with long, straight hair the color of spaghetti, said.
“How is that an excuse?” I asked. “Her dog bit me.”
“Well, you’re still better off than she and her friends are,” the woman continued.
Unfortunately, I had already finished signing her book.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/15/and-your-little-dog-too
He’s got the same treatment down the line – which has been exactly my experience when talking to Portlanders about these things too. You’ll get preach at about how much better off you are and how the behavior is justified. So you getting bit by a dog, your car getting stolen, your house broken into, hit by a driver with no insurance, or you getting assaulted by someone having a mental health crisis is your privilege speaking.
Sadly, he not even remotely the first. Increasingly large numbers of people are being attacked, mauled, and permanently disabled/disfigured by dogs owned by homeless in Portland. David Sedaris got pretty much the exact same response from ‘compassionate’ Portlanders that others permanently injured get: the lives of homeless folks are worse off than yours so you should shut up. The poor dogs are the focus here (certainly more important than you).
Q-Day is the day when classical computational cryptography we use today is slated to be obsolete, because quantum computers will finally be powerful enough to crack them. It is likely to have a similar effect as the Y2K crisis in that many digital security systems are not using quantum cryptography safe algorithms. The good news is that people can, and are, starting to fix things now. The bad news is that when it happens, the effects will be very immediate and catastrophic. Even that, however, is only half the story. We knew exactly when Y2k would happen (January 1, 2000 at 12:01am), but we don’t know when Q-day will hits us – until it’s already happening.
Konstanitinos Karagiannis provides one of the best, fullest discussion of the upcoming crisis. He gives a much clearer idea of when quantum computers will be able to break just about all existing cryptography – including all the encryption underlying Bitcoin and other online digital currencies. And it’s much sooner than people were thinking even 2 or 3 years ago. Like fusion power, it was always thought Q-day was 10-20 years away. It’s certainly what bitcoin promoters will tell you.
The summary?
The NIST says that all systems should have switched to quantum computing safe security algorithms by 2035 – but Konstanitinos says it’s MUCH more likely that we’ll see real quantum cracking happen sometime at early as 2027 based on the recent rapid developments in quantum computing and algorithm improvements. He points out its likely to start from government backed security agencies or very powerful, well funded organized crime groups.
What does this mean? It means any companies not updated to quantum secure cryptography will have computing systems almost completely vulnerable to having financial accounts emptied, customer data stolen, system take-overs or destruction, and ransom attacks. Secure emails and chat communications will be perfectly readable and usable for blackmail or extortion. Secure government and military communications will become vulnerable to infiltration. Infrastructure systems from airline traffic control, public transit, water systems, government computing services, to power systems become vulnerable to ransom attacks, havoc, and destruction.
It also means bitcoin and all digital currencies based on elliptical encryption/similar algorithms are very likely to drop from their current values to zero within hours after the first confirmed cracks happen. Clever attackers will likely crack a large number of digital wallets quietly over weeks and months by simply capturing the encrypted transaction data, and then flash-liquidate as many wallets as they can before the scheme is discovered and values go to zero. It’ll likely happen in less than a day. North Korea, even without quantum computing, already is doing this to the tune of billions per year.
You’re not even safe now. It’s also highly likely governments are using record-now-crack-later strategy of recording secret communications and bank transactions now so they can uncrack them later when quantum computing is cheap and easy. It’s very likely we’ll see it used for extortion in just a few years when everyone’s communications, web traffic, and bank transactions become public knowledge. If you thought Wikileaks revealed a lot of stuff, wait until governments and organized crime groups unencrypt years worth of recorded traffic.
He also covers the good points. There are cryptographic algorithms that are secure from quantum attack – which you should be using today. He also outlines how we will detect if people are using quantum computers to crack things by describing the current cracking algorithms and their telltale signatures.
Still – quantum cryptographic cracking is likely to be like lightening from the blue. Everything will be fine until it’s discovered to be happening. It’s very possible that literally trillions of dollars could be stolen in the matter of hours or days.