2. Lamplighter

Lamplighters were responsible for lighting and extinguishing gas street lamps in towns and cities before electric lighting became standard. They typically carried ladders and torches to perform their duties. The job was crucial for maintaining public safety during the evenings. However, with the introduction of electric streetlights, the need for manual lamp maintenance disappeared, leading to the decline of this occupation. Lamplighters are now part of history, representing a bygone era of urban infrastructure.

The lamplighters themselves were machine operators that replaced earlier professions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy

A link-boy (or link boy or linkboy) was a boy who carried a flaming torch to light the way for pedestrians at night. Linkboys were common in London in the days before the introduction of gas lighting in the early to mid 19th century.

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

A washerwoman or laundress was a person, usually a woman, employed to wash laundry by hand, before the widespread use of washing machines and commercial laundries. The profession existed in many cultures, spanning from antiquity to the early modern period. While the profession has historically been gendered, often associated with women, in some contexts, men also performed laundry labor. It was typically low-paid, physically arduous, and associated with lower social status.

The occupation began to decline with the rise of commercial laundries. The spread of domestic washing machines and self-service laundries further reduced the need for the independent washerwomen profession. By the late twentieth century, the profession had largely disappeared in industrialized countries.

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

A hostler (/ˈhɒslər/ or /ˈɒslər/) or ostler /ˈɒslər/ was traditionally a groom or stableman who was employed in a stable to take care of horses, usually at an inn, in the era of transportation by horse or horse-drawn carriage.[1]

7. Ice Cutter

Ice cutters were essential in the days before modern refrigeration. These workers harvested large blocks of ice from frozen lakes and rivers during the winter, storing them in ice houses for use throughout the year.

Related:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceman_(occupation)

An iceman is someone who sells or delivers ice from a wagon, cart, or motor-truck. While the advent of modern refrigeration and freezers have made the profession increasingly uncommon, in previous eras of human history, the iceman transported and sold ice harvested in frozen regions to customers in warmer climates intended for cellars and iceboxes, to help preserve food and cool down beverages and homes.

Iceman and ice-wagon in Crowley, Louisiana, 1938

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

A filling station attendant or gas station attendant (also known as a gas jockey in the US and Canada[1][2]) is a worker at a full-service filling station who performs services other than accepting payment. Tasks usually include pumping fuel, cleaning windshields, and checking vehicle oil levels. Prior to the introduction of self-starting vehicle engines, attendants would also start vehicle engines by manually turning the crankshaft with a hand crank.

In the United States, gas jockeys were often tipped for their services,[3] but this is now rare as full-service stations are uncommon except in New Jersey, 16 “urban” counties in Oregon, 4 cities in Massachusetts, and the town of Huntington, New York, where there are laws or restrictions against letting customers pump their own gasoline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis_Worldwide#History

In 1925, the world’s first fully automatic elevator, Collective Control, was introduced. In 1931, the company installed the world’s first double-deck elevator at 70 Pine Street in New York City.[11][12]

End of an era.

I don’t think he decided to end it all over AI

It’s hard to know what’s going on in someone’s life. That is, the proximate cause of him storming off might have been that argument, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t have other things creating pressure.

Magewell Pro Capture card

I’ve been kind of shifting towards use of USB devices over internal cards.

All of the USB devices that I have still can be connected to computers. Ditto for DE-9 serial ports, though I might need a USB adapter.

But I’ve seen ISA->PCI/AGP->PCIe obsolete a lot of old hardware that I’ve had sitting around, and that’s just on the PC. That includes my video capture hardware.

In March 2019, Bevin said in an interview that he deliberately exposed all nine of his children to chickenpox so they would “catch the disease and become immune.”[287]

What year was that?

I mean, when I was a kid, there was no chickenpox vaccine available. I didn’t even realize that we’d finally developed one until a few years ago.

I don’t think that my parents intentionally went out of their way to expose me, though I did catch it, but intentional exposure certainly wasn’t some sort of wacko practice at the time. You were likely to catch it sooner or later, and it could be much more severe if you had it late in life — you wanted immunity earlier rather than later. Chickenpox was just kinda part of life.

searches

Looks like it was rolling out in the US in the mid-1990s.

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

Pox parties, also known as flu parties, are social activities in which children are deliberately exposed to infectious diseases such as chickenpox. Such parties originated to “get it over with” before vaccines were available for a particular illness or because childhood infection might be less severe than infection during adulthood, according to proponents.[1][2] For example, measles[3] is more dangerous to adults than to children over five years old.[1][4][5] Deliberately exposing people to diseases has since been discouraged by public health officials in favor of vaccination, which has caused a decline in the practice of pox parties,[6] although flu parties saw a resurgence in the early 2010s.[7]

In the United States, chickenpox parties were popularized before the introduction of the varicella vaccine in 1995.[9][19][20] Children were also sometimes intentionally exposed to other common childhood illnesses, such as mumps and measles.[21] Before vaccines for these infections became available, parents regarded these diseases as almost inevitable.[21]

goes to Google Maps

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/0ef32a5c-c9ef-4efb-b171-a35f4ba75c7b.png

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

The Blackstone River in the United States is a river that flows through Massachusetts and Rhode Island. It is 48 mi (77 km) long with a drainage area of 475 mi² (1229 km²).[1] It drains into the Seekonk River at Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Its long history of industrial use in the watershed has caused significant pollution, with a 1990 report from the United States Environmental Protection Agency describing it as “the most polluted river in the country because of high concentrations of toxic sediments.”[2]

The Blackstone River has been significantly impacted by industrial activities and resulting pollution since the 18th century. Early industries discharged a variety of pollutants into the river, including dyes from textile mills,heavy metals and solvents from metal and woodworking industries.[10] Metals are still being measured in sediments near and adjacent to the river.[11][12]

https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/4178/7/WP-94-031.pdf

Despite these improvements in wastewater treatment, the condition of the Blackstone River remained deplorable. In 1937, the Massachusetts State Planning Board described the Blackstone as an “industrial river,” whose industrial uses were more important than cleaning up its pollution. In 1940, Worcester reached its peak population, 195,000, the only U.S. city of its size not on the ocean or a major waterway. Total wastewater flow from the city was about 125,000 cubic meters per day (33 million gallons per day [mgd]) and comprised virtually all of the upper Blackstone River’s low flow. The wastewater included a large volume of industrial wastes, virtually entirely untreated, in addition to the city’s sanitary wastes. These industrial operations provided the most enduring legacy of pollution in the river-heavy metals including chromium and mercury from textile dyes and other metals from the wire manufacturing, metal plating, and machining operations.

Oh, great.

If you live in a big, brightly lit city and you feel like allergy season just never ends, you might be right: New research shows that light pollution prompts plants to shed pollen longer, increases the growth of notoriously allergenic ragweed and makes our bodies more prone to allergic reactions, from runny noses to asthma.

But on the flip side, there are also going to be fewer trees and other plants in a city. That is, one might have more pollen in a city with a lot of nighttime lighting than one would relative to a less-lit city, but I doubt that one has more pollen in a city than outside cities.

“It is, of course, possible that these multiple cases are not connected to one another,” they said, “but out of abundance of caution, we are looking into any environmental factors at the school that may be a factor in their diagnoses.”

Although the high school was constructed in 2012, the evaluation will include research into any previous uses of the site.

That sort of thing does seem to be a good checkbox to tick off when one is building schools.

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

By the end of the 1940s, Hooker Chemical Company was searching for a place to dispose its large quantity of chemical waste. The Niagara Power and Development Company granted Hooker permission during 1942 to dump wastes into the canal. The canal was drained and lined with thick clay. Into this site, Hooker began placing 55-US-gallon (210 L) drums. In 1947, Hooker bought the canal and the 70-foot-wide (21 m) banks on either side of the canal.[16] It subsequently converted it into a 16-acre (6.5 ha) landfill.[17]

During March 1951, the school board prepared a plan showing a school being built over the canal and listing condemnation values for each property that would need to be acquired.[22] During March 1952, the superintendent of Niagara Falls School Board inquired of Hooker with regard to purchasing the Love Canal property for the purpose of constructing a new school.

Despite the disclaimer, the School Board began construction of the 99th Street School in its originally intended location.

Not long after having taken control of the land, the Niagara Falls School Board proceeded to develop the land, including construction activity that substantially breached containment structures in a number of ways, allowing previously trapped chemicals to seep out.

Over the next three decades, Love Canal attracted national attention for the public health problems originating from the former dumping of toxic waste on the grounds. This event displaced numerous families, leaving them with longstanding health issues and symptoms of high white blood cell counts and leukemia. Subsequently, the federal government passed the Superfund law in 1980. The resulting Superfund cleanup operation demolished the neighborhood, ending in 2004.

When the state of New York stepped in to Love Canal in April 1978, 230 adults and 134 children lived in the homes with backyards directly on the canal, 410 student went to the elementary school, and 2,618 people lived in homes spread not more than four blocks from the landfill.

Love Canal was not an isolated case. Eckardt C. Beck suggested that there are probably hundreds of similar dumpsites.[75] President Carter declared that discovering these dumpsites was “one of the grimmest discoveries of the modern era”.

I’m not the best person to ask about this; I read about this mostly because of the recent rule changes. I have seen a number of financial publications writing articles about it, though.

MSCI

I did read one article commenting that MSCI has not changed their rules and has less-permissive inclusion rules. If you have a lot of money on the line, though, I would not take my own understanding as being authoritative (I mean, even aside from the general principle of taking statements from random unknown names on the Internet with a grain of salt; I’m explicitly not claiming to have a lot of domain expertise here).

I think that the question is why some of the indices decided to change their rules, and whether the same logic might apply to other index operators, and I don’t know the answer to that. I’ve certainly seen many outraged people on Reddit saying that the driving factor is clearly some form of corrupt influence from company that might list on the index operator. An index operator might simply be concerned about keeping their index a useful metric that reflects market behavior — huge IPOs are market behavior. shrugs I don’t have the knowledge to say what’s a reasonable conclusion there, though I think that concern about misincentives is fair.

I do think that it might be worth looking into if it’s something that affects you, though. There are financial publications that have people writing about this, if you want to go digging up articles on it.

I understand that one major relevant issue that’s been discussed is the impact of very large IPOs coupled with passive index funds and some changes to how indexing works.

A lot of people have money in index funds — these are funds that track a given index.

Traditionally, indexes tend to exclude very newly-listed companies, even if they are large, from being included in indexes. This gives the market time to place a value on the company.

Companies also not-infrequently drop in market capitalization from their IPO.

Recently, the NASDAQ-100 changed its rules so that companies are included much more quickly in the index, and are given a substantial amount of weight even if only a small portion of the shares are actually available for trading.

What this means is that SpaceX will IPO. SpaceX has a very large valuation. This will cause it to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index after 15 days, unlike the way that things had worked in the past. At that point, index funds that track the NASDAQ-100 index (e.g. QQQ or QQQM) will sell shares in companies like Apple and buy shares in companies like SpaceX. If its value drops after that, as is likely, then index fund investors will eat that loss. A lot of shares that are locked up and held by insiders will then unlock (I understand that 90 days and 180 days are significant), and so if those people then want to sell their shares, that will be likely to drive SpaceX shares down. Holders of index funds will lose some money, and pre-IPO holders of SpaceX equity will have made money.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/04/01/how-the-spacex-could-affect-these-popular-nasdaq/

The S&P 500 (SPY and VOO are major index funds that track the S&P 500 index) and Russell 1000/2000 index inclusion rules also changed, though I understand that the impact on index funds that track these indices is not as substantial as for the NASDAQ-100 index.

https://spotgamma.com/spacex-ipo-index-changes-spotgamma/

One concern I’ve seen is that if sufficient companies can be blown up to very large valuations and then IPO, operating under more-permissive index inclusion rules may degrade the returns on of index funds, since those index funds will keep buying into large IPOs and likely losing money on doing so. If this sort of thing becomes a major thing over time, it might cause investors to shift out of index funds and into active funds that merely use similar strategies (but avoid buying into IPOs).

SpaceX isn’t the only company that this would affect; some large AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, with very large valuations, will likely similarly be affected.

Some folks on Reddit were referencing a video Ben Felix did talking about the phenomenon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOyFja87uyw

EDIT: The basic misincentive here would be that NASDAQ controls the NASDAQ-100 index, but their interest is in getting more companies to list on the NASDAQ; they aren’t interested in trying to maximize returns for index fund investors. Random company who might list on NASDAQ would actively like index fund investors to buy their IPO at a high price, since that transfers wealth from holders of index funds to pre-IPO equity holders. Operators of passive index funds (for QQQ/QQQM, Invesco) would like their passive fund to make solid returns, but they don’t get to set the rules for index inclusion; NASDAQ does.

Vanish has -l.

I am hoping that you put your config in a git repository so that you can revert it.

searches

https://locdots.com/

Personally, the idea of “extending the life” by installing Linux is foreign to me because I immediately put Linux on any hardware I get anyway.

Well, that’s still sort of extending it past 0, so…

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/usa250/2026/03/19/gold-trump-coin-mint/89214207007/

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has taken a big step forward in a plan to etch President Donald Trump’s portrait on a 24-karat gold commemorative coin.

The Commission of Fine Arts, an advisory board whose members were handpicked by Trump, approved the general design on March 19 for a gold commemorative coin emblazoned with the president’s image.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-trumps-spiritual-adviser-dedicated-a-golden-statue-to-the-president

Last week at the Trump National Doral Miami golf club, a group of religious leaders dedicated a twenty-two-foot golden statue to President Donald Trump, the resort’s owner.

There is just something not right about that man.

But Lisp is case-insensitive

looks bemused

I don’t do that much Lisp, mostly use it for emacs, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not.

opens emacs

(setq foo 1)                                                                                                                                                    
(print foo)                                                                                                                                                     

1

OK. So far so good.

(setq foo 1)                                                                                                                                                    
(print FOO)                                                                                                                                                     

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (void-variable FOO)
  (print FOO)
  (progn (print FOO))
  eval((progn (print FOO)) t)
  elisp--eval-last-sexp(nil)
  #f(compiled-function () #<bytecode 0xf6febdfec01a>)()
  eval-last-sexp(nil)
  funcall-interactively(eval-last-sexp nil)
      command-execute(eval-last-sexp)

Elisp sure doesn’t look to be case-insensitive. Maybe he meant some specific variant? Common Lisp?

$ sudo apt install sbcl

Apparently sbcl’s REPL doesn’t support readline.

$ sudo apt install rlwrap
$ rlwrap sbcl

Huh. Looks like with readline, I also get cursor flashing to do paren matching, kinda like emacs can do. I had no idea that readline could do that. Apparently Common Lisp doesn’t do setq either.

more experimentation

* (let ((foo 1)) (print FOO))

1 
1

Huh. So, yeah, I guess that Common Lisp is case-insensitive. That is a bit wild. I guess I do remember vaguely seeing old Lisp stuff with keywords in all-caps.

Is Scheme?

$ sudo apt install guile-3.0

Apparently the guile REPL doesn’t support readline either. God.

$ rlwrap guile

And it looks like “print” is “display” in Scheme-land.

scheme@(guile-user)> (let ((foo 1)) (display foo))
1

Okay, so that’s the syntax. Case-insensitive?

scheme@(guile-user)> (let ((foo 1)) (display FOO))
;;; <stdin>:2:24: warning: possibly unbound variable `FOO'
ice-9/boot-9.scm:1676:22: In procedure raise-exception:
Unbound variable: FOO

Nope.

I kinda feel like there are Lisps that the author could have used if they wanted Lisp and case-sensitivity, if that was the major irritation.