HN user
While there are things like heart rate monitors that can't be replicated on a phone, I've never understood why people bring up step tracking or timers as traits of a smartwatch. My phone tracks my steps and can be used to set a timer just as easily (probably easier as it is has a much larger screen).
While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks.
In the US. While disk drives were essential there, in Europe tape was standard in the 8-bit era and even most commercial software was sold on tape.
8-bit computers had no real "OS" (well, maybe CP/M on the Z80 machines counted). That made programming very different from programming on something like Windows, which involved using APIs. When you programmed on a 8-bit machine you dealt with the hardware itself. Today, the only place you program like that is on microcontrollers.
It wasn't only on the C64, although probably was most successful there. Adding structured programming to a BASIC-like language was a good idea -- so much so that most BASIC dialects in the 1990s adopted it, dooming COMAL.
If only the C64's floppy drives weren't so unbearably slow! And they even had their own CPUs -- the Apple II may have had worse graphics and sound (to be fair it was designed five years before the C64), but its floppy drives were far faster than the C64's despite being "dumb" (but then they were designed by Steve Wozniak, a singular genius).
I think there needs actual statistical evidence (rather than sensationalist hysteria) that very many people think their chatbot lover is real. Before chatbots, there were (and still are as far as I know) phone sex lines where people paid to talk dirty to an actual person. There isn't any reason to believe that most users of sexy chatbots see them as any different from those.
The plural of anecdote is not data - and it was exactly these sort of anecdotes that led to the anti-D&D hysteria as well. Often something else was going on - for instance "Mazes & Monsters itself was very loosely based on an incident where a child prodigy who was known to be an avid D&D player commited suicide. The media was quick to blame D&D, but further investigation revealed he was suffering depression because he realized he was gay and didn't know how to tell his conservative religious parents.
Eh, this hysteria reminds me a lot of the early 1980s when people seriously believed that role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons were bad for mental health - one of Tom Hanks' early roles was in "Mazes & Monsters", a 1982 TV movie that supposedly exposed the sanity-destroying nature of RPGs. Now it looks just silly. Maybe, just as we now get that people can enjoy pretending to be an elf wizard without going insane, others enjoy pretending that a chatbot is their boyfriend and girlfriend and still be well adjusted members of society.
That's interesting - Github as social media? That's an idea of would never have thought of in a million years. Personally, I'd be glad if a child of mine hung out there - not at all like something like Instagram or Facebook.
Exactly. Drew Talbot's brilliant "Bistro Huddy" (which anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant whether as a server or in the kitchen can relate to) is done as Youtube shorts because that makes sense for comedy sketches. What exactly is wrong with a short vertical video? Just that it reminds people of Tiktok?
For starters, what's "social media"? It's kind of a undefinable phrase. Obviously Facebook and Instagram are agreed to be "social media".But is Youtube social media? How about HN? Or any website with a comment section?
Do realize that the author is Czech. While being religious is the default and atheists face (mild) discrimination in places like the US, at least until the 1990s and the fall of Communism, things were reversed in (then) Czechoslovakia, with state supported atheism and religious people viewed as suspected dissidents.
Seriously, there is more to computing than the Web. I've used Ruby for more than 25 years and never used Rails. I'm a computational biologist and like to use Bioruby to automate various sequence-based tasks. Not as popular as BioPython (or I suppose Bioperl if anyone is still using that), but a similar niche.
A real, completely mechanical watch? No battery or crystal? I'm sure my Seiko isn't be best there is and maybe it could be improved with servicing, but I think electronics have given people unreasonable expectations of accuracy
Yeah, but I'm sure your microwave isn't mechanical. What makes a mechanical watch cool, even a cheap one, is that there are no electronics at all - just gears and springs and things. I think that's worth a trivial bit of inaccuracy even if a boring $10 digital watch can easily beat a $200 mechanical one in accuracy.
Is it a Seiko 5 (self winding)? Yeah, those aren't that accurate, but I wouldn't call them "junk" - they do lose or gain a minute or two a day in my experience - I generally correct mine every couple of days against my phone or computer though.
In the 1980s, you often had programmers create the art and music for games, but for the last three decades at least there have been dedicated artists and composers who often have no coding skill at all.
I love how Moby Dick suddenly puts the story on hold and diverges into a chapter dealing with the classification of whales. 19th century novels do that a lot with Victor Hugo diverging into the architecture of Paris or whatever in his novels.
Costco also delivers -- I also live in a city in an apartment and order bulky things I don't want to carry from Costco online.
They only joined the UCC (Geneva Copyright Treaty) in 1973 though. That was less than twenty years before the USSR ceased to exist. All the works published in the USSR before 1973 weren't copyrighted in the West (it wasn't retroactive).
And also, if you put an actual parrot in a room full of programmers, it might learn a few word of programming jargon, but it never will become a useful coding partner the way LLMs are.
This chess game has a min-max algorithm in it! AI slop! It should have a short person hidden inside like the original Mechanical Turk!
Biden wasn't "far left". The "far left" in US politics is basically Bernie Sanders and AOC's "squad", neither of which have ever come close to running the country.
I'm not against students working together -- as you note in some classes it is encouraged and often group projects are assigned. But this is different from the idea of a "take home exam" where students are supposed to work alone on the honor system, which is naive at best from the professor.
Yeah, lack of Vitamin D may or may not be a problem (well, obviously in extreme cases it leads to rickets, but that's rare). But skin cancer unquestionably is a problem, and not infrequently a deadly one. Pick your battles.
These days, yes! Gemma4 is only a few gigabytes and is surprisingly capable and can run on normal consumer hardware. You could certainly run it off a thumb drive
Even before AI, take home exams were a bad idea. In theory students were supposed to promise to work alone and not share work but in practice many people, especially those taking the class with friends, worked together.
The problem with that argument is it is trivial to write a Markov chain program that takes in text and then can generate the most probable series of words given a starting word. I myself wrote such a program in BASIC on a 64K 8-bit computer in the 1980s after reading one of A.K. Dewdney's columns. That wasn't at all an LLM though. There's a connection, sure, but one that is equating a paper airplane to a jet airliner.
The US military thought a lot about how to entertain its soldiers because there was a lot of downtime during a war and most of them were draftees who didn't necessarily want to be there, Another thing they did was publish pocket paperback editions of books back when paperbacks were less common.
Scientific American hasn't been the magazine it was for decades -- there's nobody writing columns like what Martin Gardner or A.K. Dewdney used to write that made the general public interested in some mathematical or computational problem. These days it is basically a clone of Discover, and being purchased by its publisher makes sense.