How does it taste?
Good. I can notice a difference between the old and the new, but it’s not that all that different. It’s still a nice combo of lemon and lime, with that bright taste. Still one of my top 5 sodas.
In his seminal 1985 essay, Programming as Theory Building, computer scientist Peter Naur fundamentally redefines software development as a deeply human activity. He argues that the primary product of programming is not the tangible source code, documentation, or specifications, but rather a shared mental model—a “theory”—constructed within the minds of the engineering team. Drawing on philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s concept of mind, Naur stresses that successful software relies on an active, intuitive “knowing how” rather than a rigid list of rules. Code and design specs are inherently lossy media; they merely capture what a program does, completely failing to communicate the “why” behind historical constraints, structural exclusions, and architectural trade-offs.
Consequently, Naur views a software system as “alive” only as long as its original engineering team actively possesses and maintains this underlying theory. When the group of programmers who understand this philosophy completely disperses or leaves the project, the program is effectively considered “dead”. Subsequent developers can execute the software and even mechanically modify it, but they are forced to treat it like a mysterious black box. Lacking the original theory, their subsequent modifications manifest as disjointed patchwork fixes that introduce unexpected side effects and ultimately accelerate overall architectural rot. In Naur’s view, reconstructing this lost theory purely from source code text is so difficult that scrapping the codebase and rewriting it entirely from scratch is frequently the cheaper, cleaner option.
This perspective has gained profound significance in the modern era of generative AI and Large Language Model (LLM) coding assistants. While AI tools can effortlessly churn out complex, syntactically perfect code, they inherently lack any structural intent or broad cross-module architectural awareness. When engineers reflexively accept these AI-generated blocks without integrating them into an evolving mental model, projects quickly fill up with theoretically orphaned codebases. Naur’s work reminds the modern software industry that writing text is no longer the primary bottleneck of software engineering. Instead, the true value and survival of software reside entirely in the human developer’s ability to maintain, communicate, and expand the underlying theoretical framework.
Part of the delight of the podcast is in their mischievous, but fundamentally good-natured observations about life — its absurdities, contradictions and continuities. For Mr. Holland, the show is popular because it reveals the strange ways of our predecessors while illuminating the common threads that bind us.
“Without having consciously set out to do this,” he said, “I think it is a celebration of the inherent fascination of the past, as the best way to understand how infinite the ways are of being human.”
How ‘The Rest Is History’ Podcast Conquered the World
When two British historians, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, began the show, neither anticipated it would become the top history podcast in the English-speaking world.
Why Do Birds Sing? is the fifth studio album by Violent Femmes, released on April 30, 1991. It was the band’s last album with original drummer Victor DeLorenzo, who left two years later to devote his time to acting, and was produced by Michael Beinhorn, best-known then for his work with Red Hot Chili Peppers on Mother’s Milk and The Uplift Mofo Party Plan.
The album featured the single “American Music,” which rose to number 2 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart during the week of May 18, 1991, and became a staple of the band’s live shows.
People who used the internet before 1999, what do you remember?
by
u/Revolutionary_Data86 in
AskReddit
ferminriii
Everything was new. Whatever new website you found, it was the first time you looked at it. There was no YouTube so people were just launching websites to be funny and post jokes and tell stories. You learned about things from your friends. I remember I was on some kind of email list that got emailed picture of the day. It ended up becoming a lot of what was recycled on FARK.com
Richard_Sauce
This is important thing. Like, yeah, dial tones and AOL, lol.
But the important thing was the expansiveness, the sense of discovery, the DIY/self-made nature of everything. Finding and building communities. The internet used to be made and controlled by people before it became a main street of corporately own websites. Nothing but digital chain restaurants now.
And lest you think I’m some rose tinted/everything was better back in the day type…..lots of things were worse then. Discovery was way harder, took effort. You might find a community, forum, site, whatever, only for it to die immediately. The internet was harder to navigate, harder to maintain, less stable, and oh yeah, no streaming video.
Still miss it. If I could hit a button to revert to back then, I would. Even with the trade offs.
Clear_Economics7010
No barriers to entry. Some wacko in a basement would have a website that looked more professional than a university. You would end up reading something only to realize halfway through it was the manifesto of a insane person not an actual PhD.
starkeffect
Having to learn HTML since there was no website-creation software yet.
FoodLionMVP
My friend and I went to a Better Than Ezra concert, and we loved their opening band so much we made an entire Geocities fan page for them. The band actually SIGNED OUR GUESTBOOK! We were maybe 14 years old? We were the coolest.
SnottyMonkey
What was rhe band? I was randomly listening to Better Than Ezra when I read this comment, true story.
FoodLionMVP
The band was called “Convoy.” They had an album called “Black Licorice” that was released around the turn of the century. I don’t know if they were ever heard from again but we definitely had that CD.
No-Author-2358
I first got online in 1993. There was no web browser – it was just typing on a green or amber screen monitor.
The Internet was like DOS. Except you could chat and interact with people all over the planet. Text only.
Book Lovers Day is celebrated on 9 August every year.This is an unofficial holiday observed to encourage bibliophiles to celebrate reading and literature. People are advised to put away their smartphones and every possible technological distraction and pick up a book to read. Book Lovers Day is widely recognized on global scale yet its origin and creator remain unknown to date.
What you’re describing isn’t just novelty—it’s epistemic asymmetry. Everyone around you knows what’s going on, and you don’t. You’re the only person in the café who doesn’t know why that group is celebrating, why there’s a line outside the theater, or why that particular neighborhood seems to come alive at dusk. The city is full of meanings that are visible but inaccessible. That asymmetry creates a kind of gentle tension, and I think our minds naturally find it compelling.
It also reminds me of a distinction made by John Dewey in Art as Experience. Dewey argues that we don’t merely perceive objects; we perceive situations—ongoing patterns of activity. In a new city, you perceive countless situations whose beginnings and endings you don’t know. You catch life in medias res. It’s a little like walking into the second act of a play: you understand enough to know something meaningful is happening, but not enough to explain it. That incompleteness invites attention rather than closing it down.
Colorado Day is celebrated annually on August 1st and marks the official 150th anniversary of Colorado’s statehood in 2026 (the historic sesquicentennial), featuring major statewide celebrations at the Colorado State Capitol, Denver Union Station, and History
via google
Here are a few pics in honor of Colorado day
Boulder Flatirons seen from Chautauqua Park
Washington Park, Denver
Crystal River, on hike to Crystal Mill
Colorado River, from rest area near Glenwood Springs.
Walker Ranch Loop trail
https://www.criterion.com/current/top-10-lists/161-edgar-wright-s-top-10
Bob Rafelson
Head
Head is my favorite film that stars a musical artist, by some degree. And yes, that includes the brilliant A Hard Day’s Night. However, the Monkees’ triumph of a movie is a Pyrrhic victory, because Head accelerated their demise, as it sees Dolenz, Nesmith, Tork, and Jones push the self-destruct button. Directed by Bob Rafelson and cowritten by Jack Nicholson, the movie shows the Monkees tearing down their wholesome network-TV, pre–Fab Four image with wild style. Much has been read into this stream-of-consciousness movie, with its overlapping dream sequences, surreal song numbers, and drug-influenced chaos. The simplest way of describing it is this: the Monkees are sick of being on their network show and attempt to break out of the studio lot, literally and figuratively. There are several scenes where the Monkees are trapped in a box, a live number where they are revealed to be plastic mannequins, and bookending sequences where the members commit suicide.So basically, the Monkees want out.
There have been some claims by the Monkees since the film came out that this message was projected onto it by Rafelson and Nicholson, but the script was clearly born of a very real frustration with their image. The movie bombed in 1968, because not many Monkees fans wanted to know that their idols had painted-on smiles. What remains is a gem of rock music cinema, with great songs and images throughout. Plus, as depressing as the theme of entrapment is, it’s frequently very funny.
I got to interview Dolenz about it at a New Beverly Q&A once. A young audience member quizzed him on the deeper themes, and he just replied, “Man, I was twenty-three . . .”
And this constitutes a supreme idealization of life, for it signifies a life which has a clear and unitary meaning, a direction, an utterly purposive movement toward an end. In this respect, dramatic art is one of the great wish-fulfilling fulfilling dreams, for there is nothing human beings more ardently crave than to be persons in such a drama. In the Middle Ages, it was official doctrine that humanity did belong in such a drama; and so the art of the drama represented a metaphysical fact. But this art has as great a poignancy – or greater – in an age like our own when the universe is generally felt to be unintelligible, amorphous, undramatic. For today art offers the only integrated drama, and we can be persons in a perfectly constructed Action only, it would seem, when we read or see a play.
The Life of the Drama
Eric Bentley
What industry is secretly on the verge of collapsing, but people outside of it haven’t noticed yet?
ChaLenCe
call centers in Asia are getting wiped out by Aiphlostonsparadise123
Customer service in general is getting wiped out by AI. Places like Amazon are the main culprits for this. The Help chat is now entirely AI-driven and you have to jump through hoops within the chat or navigate through tons of pages to communicate with an actual human.sengirminion
So I work in a call center in the inbound collections department for a large bank.And one of our primary job functions is to speak with Debt Settlement Agencies who are representing customers. These are all pretty formulaic calls, just confirming information and following basic pre-determined negotiation on settlement terms and setting up payments.
Well about a year ago we started getting calls from “agents” who sounded completely weird. And we quickly found out these were AI agents that some companies were using to do basic tasks like confirming account information was accurate. We had to adjust some of our procedures to account for these AI agents and set rules about what we could and could not do with them.
The wildest thing I experienced with one of them was an AI agent who I KNEW was AI because of the way it spoke, and whoever programmed it gave it a vaguely Indian name, and a freaking Indian accent. It was so wild that the designers would choose to give a robot an Apu from the Simpsons style name and accent just to try and hide the fact it was AI when dealing with an American call center.
We are cooked.
faberge_surprise
just wait till your bank replaces you with ai too and then it’ll just be ai talking to ai“this could have been an api call” is gonna be the new “this could have been an email”
_Z_E_R_O
It might not be a full collapse, but EMS is hanging on by a thread, and that was true even before covid. Now it’s verging on a crisis.EMTs get paid barely above minimum wage, and the turnover rate is astronomical. A lot of people in the industry view it as a stepping stone to a “better” medical job (usually nursing or ER staff), and it’s not uncommon to recruit EMTs straight out of high school.
In the past many employees put up with the low wages and high stress because they were attached to a fire department or small operation within their own community, and there was often a “family” atmosphere in these spaces, but with the corporatization of healthcare you now have all of the shittiness with none of the upsides. Those eye-tracking cameras the government is trying to shove in cars? Yeah, they were rolled out in ambulances first.
It’s no surprise that a 19-year-old doesn’t want to a job where you can get written up for sipping a coffee in the driver’s seat while you’re 10 calls deep into a 12-hour road shift, all for the privilege of being paid less than a burger flipper.
theassassintherapist
Translation and interpretation servicesA_Dog_Chasing_Cars
Yup. Been a translator since 2016, am now an English teacher who does the occasional translation or proofreading for the rare person who cares about quality.This field is dead. It’s a zombie. It’s doomed.
braaibros
Picture frames. Young people are not printing and framing pictures and older people who do are dying offkolejack2293
Any kind of cheaper restaurant in any big expensive city (NYC, Boston, Miami etc).It’s become impossible to be a low-cost, low-price local restaurant. You know, the local family mexican or italian restaurant with $12 entrees, those kinda places.
They are all raising their prices to the median now because rent is now a much larger portion of their costs. It used to be that they were able to remain cheap by keeping ingredient and labor costs low, but that simply doesn’t matter much now. Saving $1,500 a month on ingredients doesn’t mean jack shit when your rent has gone from $6,000 to $14,000 in five years.
