HN user

BirAdam

4,371 karma

Just a nerd. I like to tinker with Linux/UNIX, and I write computing history. Also, lots of coffee, cigars, books.

https://www.abortretry.fail

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www.abortretry.fail 9d ago

MITS: Rockets, Calculators, and Personal Computers

BirAdam
54pts8
www.abortretry.fail 20d ago

Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems

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2pts0
legiscan.com 4mo ago

Colorado Will Require Age Attestation on Computing Devices via OS

BirAdam
4pts4
www.abortretry.fail 7mo ago

The Osborne Computer Corporation

BirAdam
9pts0
www.abortretry.fail 7mo ago

The History of Xerox

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4pts0
www.abortretry.fail 7mo ago

SRI and Arc: The Dawn of the Information Age

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www.abortretry.fail 9mo ago

The QNX Operating System

BirAdam
322pts142
www.abortretry.fail 10mo ago

Creative Technology: The Sound Blaster

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163pts113
www.abortretry.fail 1y ago

Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory

BirAdam
126pts40
www.abortretry.fail 1y ago

Nippon Electric Company

BirAdam
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www.reuters.com 1y ago

Arm Holdings to cancel Qualcomm chip design license

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2pts0
www.abortretry.fail 1y ago

The Rapid Rise of eMachines

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4pts1
www.abortretry.fail 1y ago

The History of Windows 2000

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www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

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346pts365
www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The Floppy Disk

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www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The Itanic Saga

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www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

Windows Millennium

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www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The History of Xenix

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41pts11
www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The History of the IBM 5100

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news.ycombinator.com 2y ago

Ask HN: Has anyone used a Tenstorrent Grayskull card with an LLM?

BirAdam
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www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The History of GM-NAA I/O and SHARE

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www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The History of Slackware

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www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The History of Microsoft Encarta

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www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The History of Lotus

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www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The History of OS/2

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www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The History of Windows 98

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www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The History of Red Hat

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www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The Birth of Windows Gaming

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17pts0
www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The History of Windows 95

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4pts0
www.abortretry.fail 2y ago

The History of Windows NT 3.1

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78pts74

The owners of the social networks are billionaires with great lawyers and lobbyists on staff. They get politicians to introduce bills pushing the responsibility to the OS instead of the social network.

Of course, I am not sure why anyone trusts the global elite after JE. Telling any system the age of a user could be more harmful to that user than the supposed harm of the software itself.

I’ve always hated the use of the word “information” in relation to things like spin.

Information and order are effects of human perception and preference. They exist as abstractions in the mind and not in reality.

Same here. Applications developers and QA often can't really do their jobs, so I get roped in on every problem it seems. Plans to go out with my family on my birthday? Canceled. Plans to go kayaking with my wife on Saturday? Canceled. At this point, I am extremely tempted to leave my job, sell my house, buy some land in Wyoming or something, and just be content to be poor.

Well, politicians are generally liars. Trump, Obama, Biden, Bush, Clinton, Reagan… we can go all the way back to McKinley and I could easily say that the campaign people voted for was not what was delivered. Even more, it was usually the opposite.

Nah. People actively voted for a guy who said no war. Then he got the USA into a dumb war. Just like all the rest.

Voting has objectively not produced the results that the people have wanted, and this is not new. Voting doesn’t work. Being “informed” changes nothing. The only way the hoi polloi can have any effect whatever is typically through rather violent uprising. This works for maybe a generation, and then it all starts falling apart again.

People also forget… XP had more than the one tonka-toy theme from Frog Design. There were several themes. Some appealed to my visual tastes, some didn’t… but I do think they were well designed, which is more than I can say for most UI design today.

That depends upon the type of SSD. There’s compact flash which is natively IDE, and the controllers are extremely weak, then there are modern TLC SATA drives where the controller would probably be a bit more powerful than the machine’s CPU.

Nah. You’re assuming that the developer has some experience. The false assurance that the magic of Rust will protect the developer from himself/herself will lead that young developer to make worse decisions. An experienced developer typically has discernment, and has learned, rather painfully, that he/she can make serious errors in any language.

I have voiced a similar thought more succinctly: “it is your worst software that will live forever.”

The implication is that you should always strive to release software that isn’t overly buggy, isn’t slow, and is general a pleasure to use.

It’s the solution to the second information problem. Hypertext arose from Bush’s Memex, and the information problem it offered to solve. Now, there is simply so much information available on the modern Memex that it is impossible to make any sense of it all. So, we now have LLMs. There are still some issues with them, but they’re good at what they do.

I have mixed emotions about LLMs and AI more generally. I fear the dystopia, hope for some marginal improvement in human life, and I genuinely enjoy playing around with local models. But, I think there may be near term harms that outweigh the gains. We shall see.

In the USA, there was never a need for a military coup. After the Spanish-American war, the MIC was so wealthy that they simply bought influence. A few million handed to influential politicians is far cheaper than a coup.

The USA has the best government that money can buy.

This is among the "real" differences between workstation/server CPUs and commodity chips for laptops/desktops/handhelds.

Even then, if a commodity chip isn't pushed full tilt at all times, and assuming that the venting and dissipation are adequate, a commodity chip can last a long time.

You could likely get some funding for a PAC based around this. You just have to get Altman, Musk, and the other to realize that it’s a good marketing move.

“Our AI is so awesome and boosts productivity so much that no one has to work another 5 day week, ever again.”

First, I’m not talking about boomers. Second, if I were, those same people paid taxes on that house for decades. Is it not okay for that rate to fall in their latter years? If they sell, they then pay taxes on that sale amount.

Intergenerational war is stupid. Why be angry because someone lived in a time they gave them a benefit? In the case of the boomers, they were also the generation beaten by cops, water cannoned, and shot for being antiwar and pro civil rights. While many boomers are crappy, they’re are also every bit as diverse as any other group.

Finally, the old folks I was thinking of were born in the 20s and 30s, not the 50s.

All of the oldest folks I knew were wrong about many things, but they were right to say that morality must be at the center of all public discourse. Pensions were part of the contract of employment for many old companies. As those companies became more interested in ever higher rates of return without offering higher value to customers, the companies became fragile. Becoming fragile, they were eventually broken. Then the pensions are unfunded by no fault of the employees.

A company doesn’t have to make billions per quarter to be solvent, it only needs to beat inflation. Beyond that, the people running the company should have some basic human decency. If they don’t, we as consumers, employees, founders, whatever can and should cease doing business with them.

I pay water, sewer, gas, and power to those utilities directly. The taxes to my county don’t pay for roads as that’s handled by the state DOT. The bulk goes to county police, fire, and schools. Yet, these haven’t seen increased costs, the people in those jobs haven’t received pay raises (which, my God, why not?) and overall, I can’t see why my taxes then got raised.

The HOA is something I could fight, but mine is currently cheap. The taxes, however, are infuriating. I’m getting taxed on unrealized gains after having paid taxes when buying the home. There is nothing I can do about the taxes, and if I do not pay my home will be taken. Essentially, I cannot own my home in any meaningful sense.

Ruby for Good 2 months ago

I meant it honestly. What excuse do people have to choose anything other than mission critical technologies if the AI system can do most of the heavy lifting? Why should we settle for anything less than five 9s of uptime?

By your reasoning of what is or is not a distribution, Ubuntu is not a distribution. After all, it’s just opinionated Debian. The vast majority of distributions are, by your logic, not distributions. I’m okay with this, but that isn’t how the word is commonly used.