RetroTechie

It's okay to ASK for permissions afterwards, if user can decline. But if such permissions are required to use the device normally, then the proper course of action is decline, if product then fails to do its job, take it back to store as broken & demand money back (no, coupons won't do!). Any seller refusing at that point would have a hard time avoiding legal repercussions should you decide to pursue it.

That is: in countries with reasonable consumer protection laws (like EU).

Google is too big a company to let something this essential slip through. Therefore the only reasonable position is to assume it's intentional, unless somehow proven that it was just incompetence.

If intentional, that would count as a repeat offense. I hope EU regulators throw a crack team of coders/researchers at this, disassemble every last bit of binaries involved, check history of changes, turn Google offices upside down for relevant internal docs/memo's etc. The works.

Then -unless proven to be an honest mistake- fire up another anti-trust case. But this time tripling or x5 the fine.

A company of Google's size & influence, pulling this kind of shenanigans repeatedly, should either be forced out of business or become unprofitable. Oh and have the responsible leaders up top (CEO?) serve actual jail time.

Read: discs could be bad on day 1. Or mostly ok but with some corrupted files in there. But user didn't check, notice or even care. Decades of storage don't improve anything (other than the data not being needed anyway).

Title shortened & to undo exaggeration. Often referred to simply as "Helsinki bus theory".

Edit: A better source is linked at the bottom of the Medium article:

https://petapixel.com/2013/03/13/the-helsinki-bus-station-th...

The Internet Archive had this also:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200322054601/http://www.fotoco...

But I considered it unkind to have a HN submission hammer the IA.

No doubt that effect is real. But I think of it as this: some activities excercise your brain in ways that improve it, make new connections between neurons etc. While other activivities don't. Or worse: degrade your brain. Aaand: which is which, also depends on what you've done before. Or how often you do it. Or in what environment.

People who read books all day, every day, may become walking libraries who know all their classics. Are they smarter? Have more 'agile' brains? I doubt it. Perhaps the brain specializes on that activity & becomes veeery good at it. Potentially becoming worse at other activities. Granted: there's probably a lot of 'unused' capacity in most people's brains such that improving one area doesn't come at the cost of other abilities.

But I do suspect there's the rub: a healthy brain must be excercised regularly. Not just by doing again & again something it's already good at (however challenging). But also by trying new stuff. Activities not done before. Explore new subjects in entirely different fields. Especially stuff that promotes imagination / creativity as opposed to more passive consumption like movies or music. Couch potato? Move your muscles!

I'm not sure whether there's a way to max out that brain excercise part (if healty, and assuming it's possible in the 1st place). But chances are reading would be part of it. Longreads & a broad range of fiction in particular. Some puzzle or exploration / building type games could be. Mechanical construction stuff a la Lego surely is. As well as a variety of sports (doing, that is! Not watching or discussing). Socializing in various ways: in moderation.

As for people choosing (?) to spend a big chunk of their lives on passive consumption (great Dutch wording: "je leven wegflixen"): let 'em. If post-scarcity, information-overloaded society moves the masses' lives there, so be it.

Personally I prefer a hike up a mountain, improving a hands-on creative skill, a thoughful discussion, or a deep dive into an interesting new subject.

Then try to imagine how much human capital is wasted this way. Because for 'reasons', humans won't let their fellow humans enjoy the most basic necessities of life. While it would be so easy to fullfill them.

Oh btw for the "AI generated!" naggers: https://aeon.co/about

Then maybe throw some small(er) sized images in that pdf + link to full-sized ones on the web.

Assuming jjk166's position that space industry's environmental impact is akin to a rounding error overall: it's hardly competing with "overhauling transportation and power grids here on Earth" because these 2 activities are limited by different bottlenecks.

For both, government funding is an important factor. But the space industry is limited by long development/testing cycles (spacecraft & their engines, designing & building satellites, etc). Or simply commercial demand for satellite-related services.

Whereas the energy transition is largely depending on permitting issues (for new power cables, land for solar or wind parks), production capacity of specialized companies, shortage of qualified workers, price vs. market tipping points, geopolitics & more.

Apart from governments' limited role here, cutting back one doesn't speed up the other.

The bigger issue is presenting [moving to space] as a fix for problems back on Earth. That's just ridiculous. Building & putting anything in space is waaayy more difficult & expensive (read: more resource-consuming) than doing the same on Earth. Not even a tiny fraction of Earth's population can be moved to space in the forseeable future. Surviving in space (long-term) is harder still than surviving on the open ocean, in a desert, or on Antarctica.

So humankind is stuck on Earth for the time being. To survive as a species we MUST make things work on this planet.

Space industry should focus on complementing that: science / exploration, telecom, Earth observation, maybe some niche manufacturing that's small-mass but enabled by 0-G, etc. Building datacenters in space? Send up mirrors to aid the energy crisis? Anyone saying such things with a straight face has lost their marbles and/or is BSing you.

But for believers: okay! Research what's needed, do the math & see how that works out. Maybe surprise us all.

Just a thought: how do lengths of the sides compare between north pole's hexagon and this south pole decagon? Causes might be unclear but perhaps that side length corresponds to a 'wavelength' that's more-or-less a constant?

Download a closed-source binary for <platform>, payment via appstore? Ads inserted in output? Freemium vs. pro tier offerings? Some other way?

This seems like boxed software of old, right? Cracked and distributed on warez sites in no-time.

This research program is being underwritten by an anonymous donor, and will continue into the summer."

Wow... undoubtedly much stuff that's been collecting dust for decades, and they haven't even taken inventory of what's there? Or (assuming the effort described above went ahead) no result posted on the website.

A prime example: cookie dialogs. On a slow connection, page loads, large parts are rendered, and you start reading. After that, some script starts to present a cookie dialog, and everything freezes. Page doesn't scroll anymore, buttons don't work, sometimes a previously-readable page is darkened or otherwise obscured so you can't keep reading while this goes on.

Then a whole bunch of stuff is downloading, which (again: "slow connection") takes forever. Like 20s+. Halfway through you see "accept / reject / settings", but none of those buttons respond (except the dark pattern where "accept" often works faster or smoother than either "reject" or "settings". Aaargh!). When things respond again, consider yourself lucky when page re-renders as before.

Which also runs afoul of 1 of my pet peeves with user interfaces: DO NOT PRESENT A UI ELEMENT UNTIL CODE TO PROCESS ITS USE, IS PRESENT IN MEMORY & READY. Really simple right? Yet I see examples ignoring this oooften.

A 'slow' CPU, low RAM/swapping etc just makes this worse. Web developers tend to have fast machines & connectivity so they may not even be aware of this. Or think it's a non-issue even though it affects many users - existing or potential.

In the process, the public lost the benefit that less-profitable part provided. Besides ripping up a company that was doing fine as-is.

You call that "reallocating resources to more productive uses". Yes that may be what's happening in some cases. But not always.

Less-profitable != non-beneficial to the public. At this point I regard PE entities as value-extraction machines. Which sometimes, but rarely, work with the public's benefit in mind.

And let's not get started on cases where PE secured loans, sold off a company's assets, only to lease them right back. Leaving company deprived of their assets & debt-laden, going under shortly after, while PE firm runs off with the goodies. Most people would think of that as theft & destruction. But in high-finance world it's named differently & somehow legal.

In science, that's the only way to obtain results: do experiments, gather data.

It's also what sets scientists apart from other people: curiosity. "Hey that's odd, I wonder...". Non-scientists (read: most people) just care about quick answers & how to apply knowledge to their situation.

Note that knowledge in a field, intelligence, 'professional qualification' or whatever, is not essential. These can all be learned or 'sourced' from 3rd parties. But (imho) the curiosity part is essential to make a good scientist.

AI helps to trawl through the mountain of data & knowledge already out there. Re-hash & make it more easily accessible. Discover connections (like proving a math conjecture) that were overlooked before. Which is a good thing. But it can't produce raw data itself. Unless given control of equipment to run experiments on its own. Which might happen btw - if not done already.

The fun thing about research like this is that biology is a 'dirty' science (pun intented): results obtained in experiment A may differ from results in experiment B, due to differences in the local environment: presence/lack of other nutrients, bacteria occuring in A but rare/absent in B, specific varieties of crop used, pollinators, soil pH, etc (yes even local climate).

It's fine if people use AI to lower the bar to entry & make sense of things they don't (yet) understand. But it's sad if people think AI has all answers when it does not, and cannot possibly ever do so. Or even hallucinates at times. Rely on AI as The One Oracle(tm) at your own peril.

"Truth is not decided by majority vote".

Worse: apps could have been installed previously but stop working anyway, because server 'stops talking' to older versions of an app. It just varies how long it takes before the app becomes useless.

It's ridiculous how often & where tech is required these days where it really shouldn't.

One example: recently I discovered that on the (main) train station in the province capital near me, going to the toilet requires a bank (ATM/debit) card. What?!? FYI: we're talking a city with ~100k inhabitants.

Decades ago, you could just use a toilet. Done.

But ofcourse it needs cleaning, and personnel costs money. So, they'd put up a bowl where people could drop a few coins.

That didn't last long lol. Next: some small mechanism attached to door handle. Insert coin, open door.

Of course, some acts of vandalism & theft later: do away with the cash. And because 'everybody' around here pays with card+PIN 'everywhere' anyway, let's stick that onto the access-to-toilet.

On the surface, this whole progression seems 'logical'. But it's not! You've replaced something that shouldn't require tech at all, or at most a simple mechanical thingie, with something that requires electricity, internet connection, an electronic payments system backend, and may have the ability to track who used what toilet, where, when & bank account involved.

Insane! Issues like 'how to pay for toilet use' play worldwide, and this is the best you could come up with?

Arab countries & Europe's Eastern block each have their own computing histories that's very different from the usual US-centric tale.

Greetings back! The only drawback is that (statistically speaking) remaining lifespan is shorter for a 'greybeard' than a youngster.

Apart from that, I feel lucky to have experienced in my life the introduction of: b/w -> color TV, walkmans, home/personal computers, networks/BBSes, floppy/hard drives, CD/DVD/BR, LAN parties, 3D gaming, internet, mp3 players, mobile phones, smartphones, cheapo+powerful compute hw like Raspberry Pi family, and now AI. Not to mention enormous advances in science (especially medical), materials technology & general wealth. I could go on but you get the picture. We truly are living in an age of marvels.

My dad's day job (so 1 gen back) mostly involved paperwork & manually calculating numbers on a calculator. Public libraries did housekeeping on paper cards (see a previous submission of mine), and did so for generations. A century+ ago most people spent their days in agriculture & living under desperately poor conditions.

No doubt today's youngsters will see many advances of their own. But they won't eg. appreciate what cheap cpu's can do, as they haven't witnessed a time those didn't exist. Smartphones & co have been around them since birth.

Greybeards among us are lucky to have the perspective of experiencing that 'tech-hockeystick-curve' of the past ~50y or so.

If AI works out as proponents would make you believe, then either you'll see masses of people out of a job - for which society is unprepared. Or you'll see a big, society-wide productivity boost. Read: consuming non-renewable resources on this planet even faster (not just energy).

Society as a whole would benefit if rollout would slow down. Give us time to reflect on those 2nd-order effects & how to address them. But instead we have the opposite: a crazy race with big AI labs trying to out-spend & out-do the other guy, ignoring externalities everywhere.

Per-drive individual sounds, and BSoD included. Nice touches, love it!

Don't destroy the space they live in & most animals will happily stay away from humans.

Article discusses qualitative aspects a la "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

Reads to me as going for a quick & dirty fix.

So ehm... yeah prices went up a lot. But expensive? Back in the day, I bought RAM chips clocking in at some # of Kilobytes for such money.

"IBM's Fred Brooks Jr. (..)"

Yes, that guy from "The Mythical Man-Month" fame.

1) Developing cures for human diseases / health conditions. And 2) Understanding the mechanisms behind those diseases.

Obviously findings in mice don't apply to humans 1:1. Humans != mice. But that doesn't negate 2). Every single link in a complex process that's better understood, brings solutions closer to becoming reality. So 2) helps with 1) as well. Just in a less direct manner.