9 ms·

John A Phillips

158 points by barry-cotter 4y ago

ackbar03 4y ago
What a badass. He even has Aristotle as his middle name and his company's name
- jiggywiggy 4y ago
  Just shame he ends up dedicating his time to data
  - jamesrom 4y ago
    ... instead of nuclear bombs?
    - capableweb 4y ago
      Instead of safety devices ("slowly moved away from creating nuclear things and invented a motorcycle air bag"). Surely that would have a better impact on the world instead of aiding political campaigns with machine learning, ads and data. Edit: Yeah, reading his Wikipedia page, I'm 100% sure he could have spent his time better. > The experience he had gained during his campaigns obtaining the voter list from the state and using it for campaign purposes led him [...] to found Aristotle, Inc. [...] a consulting firm for political campaigns [...] It specializes in combining voter lists with personal data from other sources (such as income, gun ownership or church attendance) and data-mining, to assist with micro-targeting of specific voter groups; as of 2007, its database contained detailed information about ca. 175 million U.S. voters and it had about 100 employees.
    - jiggywiggy 4y ago
      We have so many data companies. He clearly show ability to build some "real" world applications.
danbruc 4y ago
... if you happen to have a critical mass of enriched Uranium [1] laying around in your garage. [1] Preferably not in a single lump.
- m_mueller 4y ago
  isn't getting the weapons grade Uranium (or Plutonium) what is most difficult about making a bomb anyways? My assumption is, once a terrorist group has achieved that, and has transported / smuggled it to their target, it's game over anyways. Harbor towns must be particularly vulnerable to this, considering the amount of shipping containers going through there...
  - danbruc 4y ago
    For a simple bomb you want Uranium, Plutonium emits too many neutrons which are likely to cause a small chain reaction while your critical mass is in the process of forming and this predetonation can then blow everything apart before a proper critical mass has been formed. A gun type design where you just smash two subcritical lumps of metal into each other is, as I remember, nearly impossible to achieve with Plutonium you can realistically produce. EDIT: Interestingly another commenter says that this actually was a Plutonium design.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    No, making a true atomic bomb is extremely difficult science and engineering. Now, a dirty bomb, which is just a conventional explosive together with radioactive material - designed to spread radioactive material instead of releasing the fission energy into one giant explosion - is easy to create, but not that much more effective than just a conventional bomb. It would trigger a massive cleanup effort, and it would surely give some people cancer later down the line, but it wouldn't be that spectacular.
    - danbruc 4y ago
      No, it is not that difficult, at least if you are fine with not having the most efficient weapon. You take a metal pipe, put a lump of Uranium and some explosive at each end and to a first approximation you are done. The USA did not even test their gun type design before dropping it onto Hiroshima because it was so simple that they were confident that it will just work.
bluelightning2k 4y ago
We need ctrl+Z for inventions.
- amelius 4y ago
  It's either that or ctrl+Z for humanity.
- m_mueller 4y ago
  Consider the potential unintended consequences of de-inventing the bomb. The cold war would probably have been hot in this case.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    Missing the point. If lone wolf terrorists have access to engineered viruses or atomic bombs, that's bad in a unique way, because there's probably going to be >= 1 unhinged people who will use it, and all you need is 1. If we're dealing with a world where only states can access the tech, the probability that >= 1 state will be sufficiently unhinged to use it is far lower. We will eventually need a metaphorical CTRL+Z on tech, probably through government power and maybe world government. The fragility of us as organisms is about constant, but tech is going to keep getting better and cheaper.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      We don't have a Ctrl-Z, but we have a sort of a pause button. Non-proliferation agreements, IEAE inspections, bans on selling certain products that are key enablers of production of atomic weapons. With viruses, it's a bit harder, medical work us hard to distinguish from weapons work.
      - hackerlight 4y ago
        This is again referring to the current state of affairs and therefore misses the point. These controls work for now because such tech is expensive and difficult. A future where that's not the case isn't so unlikely.
NavinF 4y ago
>Phillip’s professor has said that the design would likely work, but his design was not actually built Ok so it's not really $2k nor is it an atom bomb.
- highwaylights 4y ago
  err... good?
- imdsm 4y ago
  I'm not sure if I follow. It was a design for an A bomb that would cost $2k, ergo, a $2k A bomb. Obviously have to adjust for time and inflation.
  - thombat 4y ago
    It's like a $5 meal kit for a "BBQ meat feast" that has the recipe, spices, but doesn't include the meat. So once you've visited the specialist butcher and spent a lot more money, now you have the $5 feast.
    - blackoil 4y ago
      The research was not sold for 2k. It was expected BOM for ingredients listed in the recipe.
      - thombat 4y ago
        If this paper (that none of us can ever see) really included the plutonium in that BOM then it would be interesting to know how he derived a price for it, since it's not really a openly traded commodity.
        topynate 4y ago
        Funny enough, Pu-238 was on the market at one point (with plenty of restrictions). It was used to power pacemakers. It's still used for spacecraft. I'm not sure how expensive it was in the '70s but it is very expensive now. American production is supposed to be scaling up, but only to about 1.5 kg a year.
temptemptemp111 4y ago
bjarneh 4y ago
> and was even approached by both France and Pakistan making offers to buy his research Probably quite a few others as well...
- thombat 4y ago
  Those were the countries offering to buy. In his position I'd be fearing offers of "non-financial inducements"
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Given the topic, you could almost call it "payment in kind"...
LightG 4y ago
So I can cosplay as Raven out of Snowcrash ... for real!?
atemerev 4y ago
Nuclear simulations are my hobby, and I have a few pet projects in the area. It is impossible to build a bona fide nuclear device for $2k (it is possible to build a dirty bomb with this budget, but it is not interesting in any way). To achieve sustainable prompt criticality, you need high-quality starting material with low spontaneous fission, and a fast assembly (microseconds). "Gun-type" assembly is not used anymore even by new nuclear programs, as it is very inefficient (and still requires quite a lot of precision engineering). With implosion assembly, you need to learn quite a lot about shock compression, numerical simulations of detonations, and again it requires some precise engineering. "A nuclear bomb is like a half-ton Swiss watch", as somebody have said. I believe it is possible to build a nuclear device from scratch, but you need a few years, explosion testing rigs and radiography equipment, a team of engineers and physicists, and a few millions budget. If you don't have starting material, it will be much more expensive.
- varjag 4y ago
  $2k in 1978 money. More like 15k now!
  - floodle 4y ago
    I get $9,088.22 on an online inflation calculator. Although I do wonder whether uranium is included in the consumer price inflation index!
    - varjag 4y ago
      I prefer to compare it to other industrial products. 1973 Ford F-100 (Sixth Generation): $2,889 - $17,387.85 https://www.thedrive.com/news/34333/heres-how-much-the-ford-f-150-has-increased-in-price-over-the-decades https://www.thedrive.com/news/34333/heres-how-much-the-ford-... Tho of course the end of decade added up to the inflation..
      - the_gipsy 4y ago
        So would we also get an H-bomb then? Because a 2022 car is much, much more technologically advanced than a 1973 one.
alkonaut 4y ago
If you just want a bad atomic bomb, isn't it enough to put 2 chunks of fissile (enough) material at either end of a very thick steel tube and shoot them together using explosives? The question is how you use $2k to buy or produce the fissile material, because if the BOM was really $2k including "weapons grade" fissile material then the interesting question is how to get the fissile material that cheaply. If the BOM is $2k excluding the fissile material then... is that really surprising? I thought crude bomb designs were pretty easy to create if you have no interest in maximizing yield or minimizing how dirty the bomb gets?
- rich_sasha 4y ago
  No expert here; apparently this requires more / more enriched uranium. Since enriching uranium seems to be the bottleneck, this is suboptimal. This is why the Hiroshima bomb worked like this, but the second one, in Nagasaki, worked by compressing plutonium with explosives instead. There's also the question of "compactness". If you want to carry the bomb by plane, say, it has to be light-ish and compact-ish, which this design lends itself less to. If you want to shoot it up in a rocket, this is even more important.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    The article states it was the size of a U-Haul. Nothing flight-worthy
    - ok_dad 4y ago
      Fat Man was 20k pounds, and about the size of a large automobile.
    - ascar 4y ago
      No it mentions "the actual bomb would fit in the size of a U-haul trailer".
    - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
      Depends on the airplane you drive it into.
janmo 4y ago
The real nuclear terrorist threat comes from nuclear power plants, they are way less secure than governments want you to believe they are. As we now know that they go boom once there is no more cooling, which occurs if there is a power outage (with failure of the backup diesel generators) or if there is a leak in the waterpipes.
- junon 4y ago
  This is a complete oversimplification and dismissal of the feat of engineering that goes into nuclear power plants.
  - titoCA321 4y ago
    These plants also have armed security and other physical and electronic deterrents along with engineering personnel to respond to different crisis.
etiam 4y ago
I've been trying occasionally for years to recover a piece of interview where the interviewee was musing on the consequences and handling of someone inventing an atomic bomb well within reach of possession for common citizens. The comment was roughly that it would be an outstanding technical achievement and probably worthy of major awards, but of course that's not what we'd do. More likely we'd burn the designs, lock the inventor up and throw away the key. It seems, given this post, that it was not literally accurate, but I still find it a wonderful illustration of how much technology is not morally neutral and can lend itself more or less readily to constructive or destructive purposes. Really wish I could find it again, or at least attribute properly.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >but of course that's not what we'd do. More likely we'd burn the designs, lock the inventor up and throw away the key. Which is exactly what we should do (in fact, the inventor shouldn't be locked up, he should be "disappeared"), if we want to avoid horrible destruction. I really think this kind of thing might be the answer to the Fermi Paradox: Just imagine if any idiot could easily construct not just any bomb, but a doomsday bomb that destroys the whole planet. The planet wouldn't last long, because sooner or later some mentally ill person is going to build one and set it off.
  - sawyna 4y ago
    If we carefully think about it, someone is going to do it judging from the fact that the person did it purely from textbook based information. I’d rather think it’s better to identify ways to build such things and prevent wide scale adoption in a reasonable way. Locking up people and burying the evidence is a short term solution. Building ways of resilience and to be able to thwart or diffuse such bombs or to make laws which make it harder to extract raw materials seems a good long term solution to think about.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      >I’d rather think it’s better to identify ways to build such things and prevent wide scale adoption in a reasonable way. But how do you do that? Suppose some new physics are discovered, and this makes it trivially easy to build a doomsday bomb using readily-available materials that simply can't be restricted. >Locking up people and burying the evidence is a short term solution. Unfortunately, yes: if it gets to my scenario above, it's probably just a matter of time. >Building ways of resilience and to be able to thwart or diffuse such bombs or to make laws which make it harder to extract raw materials seems a good long term solution to think about. Again, in my scenario, anyone with half a brain can easily build the doomsday bomb using stuff from the grocery store. We're not talking about plutonium here, we're talking about very common materials. How do you stop the world from being destroyed?
nathias 4y ago
too bad, he could have build one for himself and drive it around on a motorcycle and become a sovereign individual
rawoke083600 4y ago
Somewhere / everywhere in the basements of governments, there are a lot of "topic/word filters" alarms going off :D
klabb3 4y ago
> Phillip’s work was confiscated by the FBI Typical government overreach. If you live in a rural area you can't rely on the government for nuclear defense. How are they supposed to defend themselves without nukes of their own?
- philshem 4y ago
  I get it. Thank you.
agmz 4y ago
Another example indicating that The Great Filter is likely technological - I reckon most species have the technological capability for a few rogue individual to wipe them out completely before they have the capability to become truly multiplanetary, and therefore hedged
eterevsky 4y ago
Is it actually possible to buy or produce enough fissile material with just $2k? What would it be? Uranium-235?
deepstack 4y ago
The real question is every human being have ability to have create these kind of bomb, I can see civilisation can be wiped out in an instance at our current level of mental/psychological/spiritual maturity.
thomasjudge 4y ago
I remember reading his book when I was a kid. Amusing read, but he & his roomie/coauthor come across a little tech-bro-y https://www.amazon.com/Mushroom-bomb-John-Aristotle-Phillips/dp/0688033512 https://www.amazon.com/Mushroom-bomb-John-Aristotle-Phillips...
- throwaway81523 4y ago
  I also read that book and thought it was pretty good (a few small parts were cringy). Tech bros weren't really a thing then, or at any rate I didn't mind it at the time. The linked page, which I hadn't seen before and is about what he is doing now: well THAT seems bro-y. Oh well.

John A Phillips

158 points by barry-cotter 4y ago

ackbar03 4y ago

What a badass. He even has Aristotle as his middle name and his company's name

jiggywiggy 4y ago
Just shame he ends up dedicating his time to data
- jamesrom 4y ago
  ... instead of nuclear bombs?
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Instead of safety devices ("slowly moved away from creating nuclear things and invented a motorcycle air bag"). Surely that would have a better impact on the world instead of aiding political campaigns with machine learning, ads and data. Edit: Yeah, reading his Wikipedia page, I'm 100% sure he could have spent his time better. > The experience he had gained during his campaigns obtaining the voter list from the state and using it for campaign purposes led him [...] to found Aristotle, Inc. [...] a consulting firm for political campaigns [...] It specializes in combining voter lists with personal data from other sources (such as income, gun ownership or church attendance) and data-mining, to assist with micro-targeting of specific voter groups; as of 2007, its database contained detailed information about ca. 175 million U.S. voters and it had about 100 employees.
  - jiggywiggy 4y ago
    We have so many data companies. He clearly show ability to build some "real" world applications.

danbruc 4y ago

... if you happen to have a critical mass of enriched Uranium [1] laying around in your garage. [1] Preferably not in a single lump.

m_mueller 4y ago
isn't getting the weapons grade Uranium (or Plutonium) what is most difficult about making a bomb anyways? My assumption is, once a terrorist group has achieved that, and has transported / smuggled it to their target, it's game over anyways. Harbor towns must be particularly vulnerable to this, considering the amount of shipping containers going through there...
- danbruc 4y ago
  For a simple bomb you want Uranium, Plutonium emits too many neutrons which are likely to cause a small chain reaction while your critical mass is in the process of forming and this predetonation can then blow everything apart before a proper critical mass has been formed. A gun type design where you just smash two subcritical lumps of metal into each other is, as I remember, nearly impossible to achieve with Plutonium you can realistically produce. EDIT: Interestingly another commenter says that this actually was a Plutonium design.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  No, making a true atomic bomb is extremely difficult science and engineering. Now, a dirty bomb, which is just a conventional explosive together with radioactive material - designed to spread radioactive material instead of releasing the fission energy into one giant explosion - is easy to create, but not that much more effective than just a conventional bomb. It would trigger a massive cleanup effort, and it would surely give some people cancer later down the line, but it wouldn't be that spectacular.
  - danbruc 4y ago
    No, it is not that difficult, at least if you are fine with not having the most efficient weapon. You take a metal pipe, put a lump of Uranium and some explosive at each end and to a first approximation you are done. The USA did not even test their gun type design before dropping it onto Hiroshima because it was so simple that they were confident that it will just work.

bluelightning2k 4y ago

We need ctrl+Z for inventions.

amelius 4y ago
It's either that or ctrl+Z for humanity.
m_mueller 4y ago
Consider the potential unintended consequences of de-inventing the bomb. The cold war would probably have been hot in this case.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  Missing the point. If lone wolf terrorists have access to engineered viruses or atomic bombs, that's bad in a unique way, because there's probably going to be >= 1 unhinged people who will use it, and all you need is 1. If we're dealing with a world where only states can access the tech, the probability that >= 1 state will be sufficiently unhinged to use it is far lower. We will eventually need a metaphorical CTRL+Z on tech, probably through government power and maybe world government. The fragility of us as organisms is about constant, but tech is going to keep getting better and cheaper.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    We don't have a Ctrl-Z, but we have a sort of a pause button. Non-proliferation agreements, IEAE inspections, bans on selling certain products that are key enablers of production of atomic weapons. With viruses, it's a bit harder, medical work us hard to distinguish from weapons work.
    - hackerlight 4y ago
      This is again referring to the current state of affairs and therefore misses the point. These controls work for now because such tech is expensive and difficult. A future where that's not the case isn't so unlikely.

NavinF 4y ago

>Phillip’s professor has said that the design would likely work, but his design was not actually built Ok so it's not really $2k nor is it an atom bomb.

highwaylights 4y ago
err... good?
imdsm 4y ago
I'm not sure if I follow. It was a design for an A bomb that would cost $2k, ergo, a $2k A bomb. Obviously have to adjust for time and inflation.
- thombat 4y ago
  It's like a $5 meal kit for a "BBQ meat feast" that has the recipe, spices, but doesn't include the meat. So once you've visited the specialist butcher and spent a lot more money, now you have the $5 feast.
  - blackoil 4y ago
    The research was not sold for 2k. It was expected BOM for ingredients listed in the recipe.
    - thombat 4y ago
      If this paper (that none of us can ever see) really included the plutonium in that BOM then it would be interesting to know how he derived a price for it, since it's not really a openly traded commodity.
      - topynate 4y ago
        Funny enough, Pu-238 was on the market at one point (with plenty of restrictions). It was used to power pacemakers. It's still used for spacecraft. I'm not sure how expensive it was in the '70s but it is very expensive now. American production is supposed to be scaling up, but only to about 1.5 kg a year.

temptemptemp111 4y ago

bjarneh 4y ago

> and was even approached by both France and Pakistan making offers to buy his research Probably quite a few others as well...

thombat 4y ago
Those were the countries offering to buy. In his position I'd be fearing offers of "non-financial inducements"
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Given the topic, you could almost call it "payment in kind"...

LightG 4y ago

So I can cosplay as Raven out of Snowcrash ... for real!?

atemerev 4y ago

Nuclear simulations are my hobby, and I have a few pet projects in the area. It is impossible to build a bona fide nuclear device for $2k (it is possible to build a dirty bomb with this budget, but it is not interesting in any way). To achieve sustainable prompt criticality, you need high-quality starting material with low spontaneous fission, and a fast assembly (microseconds). "Gun-type" assembly is not used anymore even by new nuclear programs, as it is very inefficient (and still requires quite a lot of precision engineering). With implosion assembly, you need to learn quite a lot about shock compression, numerical simulations of detonations, and again it requires some precise engineering. "A nuclear bomb is like a half-ton Swiss watch", as somebody have said. I believe it is possible to build a nuclear device from scratch, but you need a few years, explosion testing rigs and radiography equipment, a team of engineers and physicists, and a few millions budget. If you don't have starting material, it will be much more expensive.

varjag 4y ago
$2k in 1978 money. More like 15k now!
- floodle 4y ago
  I get $9,088.22 on an online inflation calculator. Although I do wonder whether uranium is included in the consumer price inflation index!
  - varjag 4y ago
    I prefer to compare it to other industrial products. 1973 Ford F-100 (Sixth Generation): $2,889 - $17,387.85 https://www.thedrive.com/news/34333/heres-how-much-the-ford-f-150-has-increased-in-price-over-the-decades https://www.thedrive.com/news/34333/heres-how-much-the-ford-... Tho of course the end of decade added up to the inflation..
    - the_gipsy 4y ago
      So would we also get an H-bomb then? Because a 2022 car is much, much more technologically advanced than a 1973 one.

alkonaut 4y ago

If you just want a bad atomic bomb, isn't it enough to put 2 chunks of fissile (enough) material at either end of a very thick steel tube and shoot them together using explosives? The question is how you use $2k to buy or produce the fissile material, because if the BOM was really $2k including "weapons grade" fissile material then the interesting question is how to get the fissile material that cheaply. If the BOM is $2k excluding the fissile material then... is that really surprising? I thought crude bomb designs were pretty easy to create if you have no interest in maximizing yield or minimizing how dirty the bomb gets?

rich_sasha 4y ago
No expert here; apparently this requires more / more enriched uranium. Since enriching uranium seems to be the bottleneck, this is suboptimal. This is why the Hiroshima bomb worked like this, but the second one, in Nagasaki, worked by compressing plutonium with explosives instead. There's also the question of "compactness". If you want to carry the bomb by plane, say, it has to be light-ish and compact-ish, which this design lends itself less to. If you want to shoot it up in a rocket, this is even more important.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  The article states it was the size of a U-Haul. Nothing flight-worthy
  - ok_dad 4y ago
    Fat Man was 20k pounds, and about the size of a large automobile.
  - ascar 4y ago
    No it mentions "the actual bomb would fit in the size of a U-haul trailer".
  - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
    Depends on the airplane you drive it into.

janmo 4y ago

The real nuclear terrorist threat comes from nuclear power plants, they are way less secure than governments want you to believe they are. As we now know that they go boom once there is no more cooling, which occurs if there is a power outage (with failure of the backup diesel generators) or if there is a leak in the waterpipes.

junon 4y ago
This is a complete oversimplification and dismissal of the feat of engineering that goes into nuclear power plants.
- titoCA321 4y ago
  These plants also have armed security and other physical and electronic deterrents along with engineering personnel to respond to different crisis.

etiam 4y ago

I've been trying occasionally for years to recover a piece of interview where the interviewee was musing on the consequences and handling of someone inventing an atomic bomb well within reach of possession for common citizens. The comment was roughly that it would be an outstanding technical achievement and probably worthy of major awards, but of course that's not what we'd do. More likely we'd burn the designs, lock the inventor up and throw away the key. It seems, given this post, that it was not literally accurate, but I still find it a wonderful illustration of how much technology is not morally neutral and can lend itself more or less readily to constructive or destructive purposes. Really wish I could find it again, or at least attribute properly.

midoridensha 4y ago
>but of course that's not what we'd do. More likely we'd burn the designs, lock the inventor up and throw away the key. Which is exactly what we should do (in fact, the inventor shouldn't be locked up, he should be "disappeared"), if we want to avoid horrible destruction. I really think this kind of thing might be the answer to the Fermi Paradox: Just imagine if any idiot could easily construct not just any bomb, but a doomsday bomb that destroys the whole planet. The planet wouldn't last long, because sooner or later some mentally ill person is going to build one and set it off.
- sawyna 4y ago
  If we carefully think about it, someone is going to do it judging from the fact that the person did it purely from textbook based information. I’d rather think it’s better to identify ways to build such things and prevent wide scale adoption in a reasonable way. Locking up people and burying the evidence is a short term solution. Building ways of resilience and to be able to thwart or diffuse such bombs or to make laws which make it harder to extract raw materials seems a good long term solution to think about.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    >I’d rather think it’s better to identify ways to build such things and prevent wide scale adoption in a reasonable way. But how do you do that? Suppose some new physics are discovered, and this makes it trivially easy to build a doomsday bomb using readily-available materials that simply can't be restricted. >Locking up people and burying the evidence is a short term solution. Unfortunately, yes: if it gets to my scenario above, it's probably just a matter of time. >Building ways of resilience and to be able to thwart or diffuse such bombs or to make laws which make it harder to extract raw materials seems a good long term solution to think about. Again, in my scenario, anyone with half a brain can easily build the doomsday bomb using stuff from the grocery store. We're not talking about plutonium here, we're talking about very common materials. How do you stop the world from being destroyed?

nathias 4y ago

too bad, he could have build one for himself and drive it around on a motorcycle and become a sovereign individual

rawoke083600 4y ago

Somewhere / everywhere in the basements of governments, there are a lot of "topic/word filters" alarms going off :D

klabb3 4y ago

> Phillip’s work was confiscated by the FBI Typical government overreach. If you live in a rural area you can't rely on the government for nuclear defense. How are they supposed to defend themselves without nukes of their own?

philshem 4y ago
I get it. Thank you.

agmz 4y ago

Another example indicating that The Great Filter is likely technological - I reckon most species have the technological capability for a few rogue individual to wipe them out completely before they have the capability to become truly multiplanetary, and therefore hedged

eterevsky 4y ago

Is it actually possible to buy or produce enough fissile material with just $2k? What would it be? Uranium-235?

deepstack 4y ago

The real question is every human being have ability to have create these kind of bomb, I can see civilisation can be wiped out in an instance at our current level of mental/psychological/spiritual maturity.

thomasjudge 4y ago

I remember reading his book when I was a kid. Amusing read, but he & his roomie/coauthor come across a little tech-bro-y https://www.amazon.com/Mushroom-bomb-John-Aristotle-Phillips/dp/0688033512 https://www.amazon.com/Mushroom-bomb-John-Aristotle-Phillips...

throwaway81523 4y ago
I also read that book and thought it was pretty good (a few small parts were cringy). Tech bros weren't really a thing then, or at any rate I didn't mind it at the time. The linked page, which I hadn't seen before and is about what he is doing now: well THAT seems bro-y. Oh well.