adestefan

It wasn't just the search that was amazing. You would go to google.com and be presented with only a Google logo, 1 line input box, and 2 buttons.

No portal, no news, no header, no login, no advertise with us, no punching monkeys.

It was a refreshingly different take on the web at the time.

Warhol wrote that in 1975 when the US was a lot different.

Always has been.

I was the student manager of all Unix systems on campus in the late 90s. Included labs of Sun and HP workstations. Managed some system connected to various lab instruments around campus, too. We stood up the first Linux lab around 1998, but most students preferred the Solaris workstations. People were just starting to put their own Linux systems on the dorm networks. It was still pretty rare for most students to even have computers in their dorm at the time.

Even supported the last remaining VAX because no one else dared dig into the wall of manuals to figure out how it worked.

Was a fun time.

Glyphosate is only absorbed through foliage. I have had good luck with brush killer.

There already are two tunnels for I-95 and I-895 under the port.

So you’d rather have Google abuse its monopoly on search to get what you want?

The App Store didn’t even exist until the iPhone 3G. Everything was suppose to be a web app until everyone, including HN, bitched about the lack of native apps.

Now here you all are 15 years later bemoaning what you have helped create.

It seems to work better when it’s not subtle. You’ll get all the *chan bois relaying your disinformation for the lulz. YouTube and podcaster hucksters trying to make a name for themselves to get a payday from some weird billionaire’s self-funded media machine. In the end you’ll get some local politicians on-board and maybe a US Senator or two.

HN consistently reminds me of the park bench scene in Good Will Hunting.

A girl would like to ask a boy to the high school dance.

A computer can do all the calculations to decide on if it's a good idea. Given the inputs of the time they have spent together, the number of glances that are passed between then in the halls between classes, if he doesn't have a date yet or not, etc. The probability adds up to ask.

So the machine decides to ask.

The girl feels it. Has all the time they've spent together has made her feel a certain way? Maybe a weird tingle each time their arms touch. Is that glance in the hall this morning not just an accident, but him going a little out of his way for her to notice? She's asked around and knows that no one else has asked him, but doe he really not have a date yet? Can she overcome the bit of anxiety about asking a boy to the dance? Will she be able to accept the risk of rejection knowing that the chances may be high he says yes?

Only she can choose.

Weizenbaum even wrote an entire book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation, on how AI is a crank term for computer science. The basic premise is that humans are not machine so stop using language that treats them as such. Especially that computers can decide what comes next, but only a human can choose what to do.

The book also has one of the best and most succinct descriptions of Turing machines and the theoretical underpinning of computer science that I have ever read. Even if you’re an AI maximalist you should read the third chapter of the book.

I'm also unsure of any innovation Spotify has made in the world of music.

Some searching has led me to the end of year recaps and a lot about advertising. Guess France will miss out.

Libgrapheme will get you there for the most part. It will let you find characters, words, sentences. It’s nice because it returns byte offsets so you can use them directly for C data structures. I wish there was a way to get the number of characters along with byte offsets which helps with things like line breaking.

https://libs.suckless.org/libgrapheme/

I just installed a ratgdo on my Lift Master door and it’s great.

As a parent the part that sucks is there is good that can come of this, but it's not on the major free-for-all platforms.

My kids are involved in some activities that use other social media-like platforms for sharing information with kids and parents, posting videos/photos, and even includes some group chat features where everyone can interact. It's been great, but 1. it's a small, controlled group and 2. there's active moderation that's possible due to the small size.

My youngest has learned to draw, and is really, really good at it, due to some amazing content on YouTube. They love to sit for hours drawing both following along and using it as inspiration for their own art work. But we all know how must of a disaster YouTube can be.

My life has also been heavily influence (good and bad) by having access to BBS and early Internet chatrooms and forums begging around age 10. I was lucky in that my father was involved in the 80s and 90s telecom boom so I had access to a lot of things (with and without my parents approval) before they became mainstream. I think overall it made me a better person getting all that crap out of my system early.

I don't want my kids to miss out of opportunities like that, but I also don't want them being sucked into the algorithm-driven shitfests of Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc.

They're not allowed to have them in class, but we all know how well banning anything with early teens goes.

The influence of social media extends to school boards being completely paralyzed. Imagine the "Moms for Access to Students During the School Day" Facebook group that would crop up and overthrow a school board that institutes mandatory cell phone bans.

I'm in one of the most affluent, pretty liberal, and successful school districts in the county and the past 5 years have been dumpster fire after dumpster fire due to Facebook getting small, extremely vocal people spun about "their children." Luckily they do hold of most of the more extreme end of the spectrum, but some things are not worth spending the political capital on. School board elections also align with US Presidential election years so turnout is usually high to keep the crazies away.

As an addendum realize that these kids were making that awkward transition into pre and early teen years at the height of the COVID pandemic. Social media was a connection to their friends and peers that they did not see in most large social gatherings for at least 6 months if not closer to a year.

Now my kids have mostly transitioned into smaller group text chats and Facetime conference calls with their closest friends as they are getting older. They are also heavily involved in sports and other activities where they're invested in getting better versus the constant competition of social media.

I have also instituted an Apple-only devices in the house because while they do have their short comings, the Screen Time settings do work very well. I don't monitor my kids closely, but I do limit the amount of time they can spend on social media services, YouTube, etc.

edit: I'm Gen X and our major problems in middle and high school where alcohol and drugs and everyone smoked. I know multiple people that died due to drug overdoses, mainly heroin, in the early to mid 90s. I have friends in their 30s and 40s that developed lung, throat, or mouth cancers. Thankfully, at least locally, that's not a problem.

It's the techno-liberatarian wing of HN that flares up on issues like this.

Meta and their lobbyists have been pounding advertising in the DC media market on TV, radio, and the Washington Post under all their brands about how they now support the government trying to mandate parents rights to limit access. First it was Instagram branded, but I've seen ads for their other brands lately as well.

It started when the Surgeon General released the report on the effects of social media usage on adolescent health [0].

[0] https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/youth-mental-h...

I have a kid that's in middle school and last year there was about a 2 month stretch of multiple daily fights that were driven by views on TikTok by 6th graders, so around age 11.

It started out small. Maybe a kid would start something in the hall while his friends pulled out their phones, recorded it and posted it to TikTok. Then they realized if they start a larger fight on the way to lunch they'd get more views because kids had their phones at lunch. Once that leveled off they realized that fights in class got even more views because it involved a teacher. It got to the point where my kid would walk outside to go to their next class because the halls were just filled with kids trying to do anything to get views on TikTok.

The larger issue were the second and third order effects this caused. Kids started refusing to go to school because of the fights and attendance problems soared. Multiple classes were constantly disrupted. Due to the layout of the school most of the hallways are narrow so it was near impossible to get to class on time.

It took the spring break and major intervention from the administration, staff, and students to finally have the fad die out. It still flared up from time to time in the spring, but never as bad as the winter.

This year it's now about how funky of a combination of socks and crocs you can post to Instagram.

Just because it's the least bad doesn't mean anyone won.

Like most things with the government they've been heavily slashed since 2008.

The pay is awful and the benefits aren’t great. You also have people constantly telling you that you must be bad at your job since you work for the government and not the private sector. It’s also not a lot of fun when half of Congress repeats the lie that what you do is worthless or even worse that you’re part of some nebulous “deep state.”

If you don’t mind all of that then you should apply. There’s always a ton of openings for technical managers.

I recently bought my wife a new Air and the only reason why I went with the M2 version was the nicer screen. Otherwise the M1/8GB would be more than fine for what she needs.

I own an IASIS IA-7301 which is very similar single board trainer The IASIS is built around the NEC μCOM-80 version of the Intel 8080. The board is attached to a plastic backer that fits into a three ring binder. An entire programming course is included in the binder.

https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=544

An Alphabet is just an ad company. What’s your point?

It was not built around any of that. It was built to facilitate compiler construction and add some introspection to that process. The problem is that building what is a compile and code generation library to cover multiple languages and multiple architectures is really hard. Abstractions start to get leaky. Next thing you know there are a bunch of assumptions and hacks that make you neat library a big ol’ mess.

I’m not faulting any of the llvm maintainers. Other people were hoping the IR and library bits would turn into more than a compiler toolkit. Unfortunately, reality sets in over time.

28 years ago was the original Bowling Alone article. That was expanded into the book by the sane title rehearsed in 2000.

It’s probably time to give it a read again.

Add in cooling requirements, too.