1bent

I run Firefox Nightly on Android, haven't seen anything like this. Besides the usual adblockers I run noscript, maybe that's the fix?

This sounds like the backstory for Alan Dean Foster's "Cyber Way". I enjoyed the novel, didn't realize how well rooted it was in actual history.

As long as I can avoid or disable "AI", I'll continue to ignore it. Consistent, reliable, predictable, that's what I want from my computers. Boring is good.

In case anyone else didn't know:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28text_editor%29#History...

I found the zed website unhelpful, but if wikipedia is to be believed, it's a successor to the Atom text editor

I'd never heard of her, so I checked wikipedia. Try that.

One domain that a little OO seems to map to without too much pain is GUI libraries. The first OO-flavoured API I ever used was Sunview, the early GUI I used on Sun-3 workstations with SunOS. It was a beautiful API; I was never tempted to mess with the verbose, complex "Intrinsics-based" toolkits that followed it. It carried on with xview; that's what I'd try if I wanted to write a GUI in C today.

djbdns is simple, easy to understand, easy to configure; it embodies a clear understanding of how DNS works.

Unlike BIND and dig, it was designed after DNS had been in use for a while.

Like sendmail, BIND suffers from being designed before anyone knew what it would need to do.

OOP has always felt to me like it was inspired by writing GUI APIs; Sun's Suntools -> Sunview -> xview (if I'm remembering the names right) were early-mid 1980s C, and felt beautifully OO, and very clean to write GUI programs. I enjoyed writing image analysis and manipulation in them. Never used the successor "intrinsics-based" Motif and CDE, the code was yucky. Didn't write another GUI until I did a dashboard (for automated software deployment) in TCL/Tk. But yeah, C++ never interested me for OO, C was fine.

Thank you!

I find it tempting to try and shove this story into an origin tale for W.E.I.R.D. --- Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.

But I guess the timing is off; this is within, not before, that.

I'd heard of it from Heinlein, but never thought it might be real.

I think of audiobooks as a very different form from books; I read lots of books, but listen to almost no audiobooks, though I've bought a few, and have listened to my favourite, Spider Robinson reading a collection of Heinlein short stories, a few times.

For me, books allow me to listen (with my mind's inner voice) to the author's voice directly; a human's dramatic performance gets between my imagination and the author.

When I want to enjoy hands- and eyes-free reading, I turn on TTS in my ebook-reading app; the mechanical, robotic voice doesn't get between me and the author. It's more like reading with my eyes.

Back before Android, I'd use flite (Festival Lite, a simple, single-file, pure-C spinoff of the Festival TTS research project) to convert a few books from txt to wav, then to ogg, and load them on an iRiver before a long drive.

I do like Librivox as a recommendation service; there's a lot of books in Project Gutenberg, but the ones that get to Librivox had one or more volunteers who thought that book worth the time and effort to read aloud.

I hadn't heard of this gizmo, seems to be a small e-ink display on an rpi:

https://learn.pimoroni.com/article/getting-started-with-badg...

Can you buy a new car without a data plan anymore?

Footnote 7's "crypto pushers rebranding as AI influencers" is something I've noticed, not as much in specific names, as the overall tone of the sales pitch.

I think you're responding to your interpretation of the title, rather than the article.

They aren't proposing increasing asymptomatic disease, they're discussing trying to reduce damage done to individuals.

I have a clear memory that, at the time, cellphone carriers were adamant about strictly controlling how their networks were used. If anything but voice or SMS crossed their network, they wanted to be bribed to permit it. The surprising coup was Apple getting them to admit a device with such flexibility onto their network.

Then Google finished the job; side-loading was no longer "jailbreaking", it was directly supported, and programming on the device wasn't prohibited. I'm not the customer for an iPhone, I really doubt they'd ever open up so that iPhone owners could install an open source app store (f-droid), and from that a full development environment (termux), within which you can install a bigger distro (Debian) to install e.g. Calibre for ebook-reformatting. Or git, or LaTeX, or rust, or emacs.

Are there any open source passkey implementations?

My password manager of choice is open source, and cross-platform, and can export and later (or elsewhere) import an encrypted backup.

I'd forgotten all about that gizmo. Under the heading Steve Jobs in my memory, it got completely replaced by "the computer for the rest of them", with a GUI tuned to hide the computer, to prevent users from being tempted to use it as a way to learn to program computers.

The NeXT was competing against Sun, priced accordingly, and novel for being weird.

weirdly broken

My favourite exploration of the potential novel applications of room temperature superconductors is Larry Niven's Ringworld.

Indeed, when I saw the headline, I thought this was going to be commenting on the various supply chain crashes triggered by the pandemic's sudden changes, after decades of cleverly squeezing slack out of shipping, ports, warehouses, and logistics coordination.

I need to read more new books; I've not been seeing the benefits of this.

Seems like this might be worth bookmarking in case I ever want to learn Javascript; reading implementations of algorithms I've written before in other languages seems like it might be helpful.

I found this really fun, reflecting as it does the views before the acceptance and experimental confirmation that there is no lumeniferous aether, and that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames.

I've enjoyed explanations of how Einstein, Planck, and their contemporaries changed our understanding; I've not seen before such a vivid story set in the before times.

I think this is more of a complaint that GUIs have prevented non-programmers from learning to do novel things with a computer; that's been the focus of GUIs since the Apple Lisa. I was working in a university comp center, and got to see a Lisa at an Apple event shortly after it was announced. Everyone who went with me agreed, it's better than an etch-a-sketch, you don't have to turn it upside down and shake to clear the screen.

But at that moment computers bifurcated: real computers for programmers, and appliances for the rest of them.

At the time they shut down Listen, some podcasts (e.g. Car Talk) were closing their back episodes and charging money for them; I figured that's why Google decided to stop the service.

When Google ditched Reader, they told me how to export my OPML, so I did, and vowed to never again depend on a cloud service for something I could do with a local client app. I've moved from one to another over the years. At the moment I'm using Feeder on Android.

Likewise when they dropped Listen for podcasts, currently I'm on Antennapod. If I can get an app from f-droid, I prefer it.

I can live with backing up my OPML files whenever I add a blog or podcast, and having no web server for desktop use or tracking read/unread progress; I just only consume from my primary phone.

I haven't paid attention in many years, but at least for the first few years (after it grew from a data format to a scripting language), each release of Lua was more powerful, faster, and smaller in executable size, than its predecessor.