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The US proves "every accusation is a confession" and "accuse them of what you do and call them what you are".

My better half had pancreatitis because of gallbladder stones and so I learnt that there's a canal that goes from the gallbladder and through the pancreas. This is not a good design. Somebody should have thought harder about this. Maybe they had a deadline or something (I need this on my desk by Saturday!).

There are tons of videos of people walking around Japan. I usually watch them while working out.

One thing I don't understand is why people buy football jerseys with ads on them.

It's been decades since I last had a football jersey because I can't stand the idea of buying something (expensive) that has an ad on it.

I see so many places that could have roundabouts instead of lights. Plus, if the maximum speed inside my town was lowered to 40km/h, we could have shorter yellows. You can never reach the 60km/h limit for more than a few seconds anyway.

I used a machine that had 8MB of RAM and a huge b&w monitor. One day I found out it would crash if your process forked more than 127 times. These things were so cool at the time but are nothing compared to a Raspberry Pi.

I tried this with my kids, but I required them to also produce a one page essay on each book. They ignored the deal. One of them actually reads and likes reading, but he won't be bothered to write about what he has read (unless it's required for school).

There's a book called Kuru by an Australian doctor who worked in PNG and studied the disease. IIRC, it's by Michael Alpers. It's a fascinating book, and it's a mixture of adventure, medicine, and anthropology. I highly recommend it if you can find it.

Neither the West nor the USSR grew coffee, though.

The West wouldn't trade (or let developing countries under its influence do it) and I bet the USSR couldn't procure enough for itself and the DDR.

AI told him to use an alternative function which was similar but didn't have the same bug.

This week I helped a colleague with a bug. He used an LLM to sort it out before telling me about it.

I'm old fashioned, so I looked at the code, saw that it used an old lib and then I searched online for a newer version. Lo and behold, the bug had been ironed out.

AI makes it really easy to not think properly about your task.

This sort of thing should be labelled.

Just as food has warnings (too much sugar, too much salt, etc), so electronics should be labelled: "requires online registration" and "captures conversations" and "scans your network".

This is not a case of maths giving you the Blues.

Someone at work said something along the lines of "so AI is going to write the documents and then people will use AI to summarise them". I think this is a good opportunity to rationalise bureaucracy but I fear we will only mindlessly automate it.

When I first found out about Tcl/Tk, it was used to give a GUI to programs written in C. I've used Tk with Tcl and many times with Perl too.

It's not only that it was text based, but that it failed in all sorts of ways.

I had a particularly bad afternoon in early 2000s when I tried to install Linux on various machines (4 or 5, each one with different hardware) and failed with all of them. Of course, I wasn't as savvy as I am now, but it's been years since I've seen an issue with a Linux install; although I might have to download and compile a driver for one thing or another, the install itself doesn't fail.

Sure, but somebody has to be home if the gas company wants to look at it.

That is weird.

Why is it inside your apartment?

Does someone have to check the meter regularly?

Anyway, great job.

You've got the nostalgia and the technical limitations which are always an interesting challenge. It's no wonder some people who grew on these things and went on to have IT careers want to play with them.

The thing that really worries me is if harvests start failing.

I reckon Apple buyers are more interested in the OS than in the hardware, in general.

I recently found a letter written by a great-aunt of mine hidden inside a book.

It is written in German, which I know a little, but her handwriting was too difficult for me. So I searched around and found this site:

     https://www.transkribus.org/handwriting-ocr

And it managed to extract the text! Anyway, it turns out the wheat harvest was very good in 1937 and thank you for the letters and newspapers.

I tried to warn them that they were hosting a phishing site once and they weren't very receptive.

Otherwise, I hosted a site with them for years and all went well.

Cheap RAM in 500 yards. ->

The UN sustainability index once listed Cuba as the only sustainable economy. Another year it was Ecuador. Cuba might be eligible again because of the embargo. My point is that you can't convince folks in rich countries to be truly sustainable and you can't convince the rest to not aim for a higher standard of living. Putin said something like that and he was right.

And we keep coming up with ideas to make it worse: blockchain and now AI.

But I have to say that if you have a very cheap solution for 25% of your use cases you should definitely use it.

What you can't do is neglect the other 75%.

I used one these things in Portugal a few years ago.

They are definitely not thought for women.

Unfortunately, "Lectronz now generates roughly the equivalent of one modest salary."

In the case of the US, 1929 and WWII bought significant changes. Then Reagan started the path back to the XIX century.

That would be securities fraud.