dleslie

Cryptonomicon has the use of a highly custom version of Emacs called OrdoEmacs.

https://dev.to/hyenast2/neal-stephenson-s-cryptonomicon-and-...

This is true; and in time it's entirely possible that AI makes us an overall wealthier and more productive society. However, from the article:

“Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”

The redundant professionals will need to find other ways of generating wealth from their productivity, and that may not be possible in a reasonable amount of time. Not in the scope of their remaining lifetime.

Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?

It is possible to have excess productivity. AI allows an existing labour pool to rapidly surpass necessary productivity levels for the existing demand.

IE, let's say I live in a small town and I open a machine shop. Should I hire every mechanic that walks in the door, forever? No, absolutely not; there is an optimal number of mechanics to hire for the demand for services.

If somehow a tool comes to exist that doubles the productivity of mechanics then laying off half the mechanics is next.

For most nations, if they find themselves in need of a 5th generation aircraft for defence then they've already lost, or are better served to prepare for a grossly asymmetric battle.

I have HDMI adapters which perform a similar function.

It's awful. Earthworm Jim and Sonic 2 are both great examples of how the art suffers; and the why is in the video I linked.

The waterfall in Sonic 2 was not meant to look like a fence.

True enough; but they want to make it about Canadian Dairy, Softwood Lumber, Steel, Aluminum and so on.

All Genesis models were capable of RGB, but almost everyone used the component and/or RF adapter. I own three American genesis models and have yet to ever own a proper RGB adapter for one.

It represents the trade deficit the USA has with Canada. To believe that this is a problem as a result of Canada's nefarious actions is to believe that Canada is preventing its citizens from purchasing American product.

Which is a common refrain with respect to our supply management system for dairy; but to believe this you have to ignore that the USA has _never once_ managed to export enough dairy products to Canada to meet or exceed the import quotas set by the supply management regime.

The truth is that Canadians simply don't seem all that interested in purchasing American dairy products.

The trade deficit with Canada is because Americans are buying Canadian products.

Enough Canadians (seriously, the vast majority) live close enough to the border that they could make a weekly trip to the USA and purchase American dairy and other American goods. In fact, prior to the tariffs many Canadians did make regular shopping trips across the border.

So let's be clear: we were buying your products to the extent we wanted to, already.

Trump did not rise to power in isolation. He has not remained in isolation while in power. Voter support for Trump is still reasonably strong, and Trump and his supporters have ensured that the mechanisms of Government are packed with loyalists.

America chose this. America continues to tolerate this. America enabled this.

This isn't something that Trump can be scapegoated for. This is what many Americans wanted, or at the very least, it is what many Americans are willing to tolerate.

And that was almost _never_ the case for 16-bit era gaming, outside of the Arcade. Certainly not for the Genesis.

The video I linked is taken of a CRT and is not a screenshot of an LCD.

This is an excellent deep dive on the issues I spoke of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI

There's a bunch on Youtube. The art has the typical issues of modern 16-bit and 8-bit games where the designers and artists are not targeting the full hardware stack of the era. Rather, they're targeting simulated machines (emulators) and sometimes also flash carts on original hardware but rendered on modern display hardware.

What I notice is that the highly detailed sprite work doesn't produce the elegant artifacting of the era, where pixel bleeding and whatnot would merge nearby colours together to produce desired artistic effects. More often what I see is a smudged mess with noise.

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

Minimalist and consistent UX, incredibly responsive applications, simple and logical organizational structure, with _excellent_ documentation and developer tools for the era.

You boot straight to a desktop, and there's no ads, alerts, pop-ups, pop-unders, noisy task apps, sidebars, widgets, and other engagement seeking focus destroyers. Every app has a reasonably consistent UX and presents as much necessary and relevant information as it can, without tedious wizards or aggressively hiding information behind folds or submenus.

Be made inroads in radio and sound production; though I don't think they knew it.[0]

There was a market starved for a stable, high quality and responsive operating system that would run on the x86 hardware that was abundant everywhere. Windows wasn't it, yet; recall this is years before XP, and Windows 98 was an unstable mess while NT was slow.

0: https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/27-tune_tracker/

Per the BeBook:

Returns the temperature of the motherboard if the computer is currently on fire.

In the simplest way. More interesting is the result for is_computer_on_fire()

https://github.com/VitruvianOS/Vitruvian/blob/0e4c6e33ab235b...

It's one of the last single-user focused operating systems. Its design from kernel to UI is intended to make the system accessible to the user sitting at the desk. It was _extraordinarily_ fast and stable on even modest hardware of the era, and its software toolkit was a delight to use.

Even now, using it feels like the system is bereft of bloat and cruft. It's a system _for the user_ that doesn't assume that the user is technically incapable.

There's an interesting fork that recently cropped up. It takes the Haiku user space and places it atop the Linux kernel.

Vitruvian OS: https://v-os.dev/

Not just frustrating, it's a security hole. Stealing focus means a user may expect to be typing a password but find it's inputted somewhere they did not expect.

Cash is more private than Monero. It is possible to engage in untraceable transactions through drop sites and post, whereas Monero wallets can reveal transaction participants when view keys are available.

I don't need to connect to any network to exchange cash, or engage in mathematical backflips to convince the network to accept my transaction. That makes it more decentralized and more fault tolerant.

Monero is only as private as its entry and exit wallets and the availability of the appropriate keys.

This can be done with cash delivered via post with no return address. Observers cannot know who sent the money or even that the receiver is getting money without opening their mail. The sender remains anonymous regardless.

Mistral is competitive and useful.

And Anthropic is famous for putting guardrails on their models, and yet continue to lead.

We don't have to, and shouldn't have to, tolerate tools that easily produce csam or similarly undesirable output.

European models are competitive, despite the concerns you raise.

I don't need a model that can easily produce CSAM or reproduce copyrighted works verbatim in order to be productive.

It would have been as easy to write a valid answer as a non-answer; _unless_ there is no valid answer.

Ok. Where is crypto currency used in a way that fiat currencies cannot be, and is adding value to the world?

I can think of nothing.

Most common fault would be hitting eject before stopping the tape, causing the cassette to eject and mangle the tape in the process.

As usual, this is a UX concern. Better tape players did not allow eject to work when the tape was engaged.

Outside of the USA it would not look like a wealth transfer to an oligarch.

Not every country is in a crypto-libertarian race to hoard power and wealth.

This is where government funding can play a role.

Sometimes there are things where the public good is best served with public expenditure.

I have been converting old tapes to digital and they do sound both different and better.

I think there's an aspect of this format having been a target for professional mixing. But there's also the background hiss and the warping of rolling tape and the low fidelity of the heads... It all mixes together nicely for a dirtier sound.