I honestly don't think Perryfractic would be that sad if it doesn't last (assuming he, Lady Fractic, and child and dogs don't become homeless in the bankruptcy) He knows perfectly well that the audience for Commodore nostalgia is small and aging and is just enjoying being part of the scene while it lasts.
A folding phone basically turns into a smallish tablet. That may have an attraction to some people, but even fewer people own or want a tablet than own or want a PC. And the people who do want tablets already have a better one than what a gimmicky folding phone can give them.
LaTeX? That's actually the primary use case I've seen for markdown -- to write papers/presentations/code notebooks in markdown that are then turned into LaTeX for typesetting.
"works and is simple"? You can argue JS works by definition because it is what people use, but it is far from simple -- JS and C++ are basically the only two programming languages where books plead with you not to use all their features but use a more maintainable subset.
It's not SF. Again, artificial intelligence has been a recognized branch of computer science since the 1950s, with journals, conferences, and applications.
"it is very hard to square the circle whereby coexisting in alliance with the Klingon Empire as we see it is the right and moral thing for the Federation to do."
You have to understand that the Klingons in TOS were a metaphor for the Soviets/Russians and TNG was reflecting the 1980s/1990s hope that democracy was taking root there and by working with them they would be Westernized.
The field has been named "Artificial Intelligence" since the 1950s, It has nothing to do with neural nets per se. It just is about systems that do what was previously thought to be only something people could do. Traditionally the big names in the field like Minsky actually despised neural nets -- Minsky even wrote a book called Perceptrons (1969) which trashed the early version of neural nets and discouraged most research on them for a couple of decades.
The problem is people who get actual news from a decent newspaper (and let's face it, after Bezos trashed the Washington Post, the NYT has no serious rival in the US) is a value for society more than it is for individuals. People might say "I don't need to read a newspaper; I can get news from my social media" but that's kind of the problem with today's society.
I think you overestimate how much the average person can understand opaque jargon like "party of the first part". I'm sure good legal writing can avoid these things, but often (such as in the licenses people are theoretically supposed to click on that they have read and agree to for software), the opaqueness is the point -- they don't really want the user to understand what they are agreeing to.
Exactly. Legal language is basically a programming language for lawyers. It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it any more than to expect a non-coder to understand source code. Even most politicians keep staff to do the actual reading of bills.
One thing that Python has that virtually no (well okay groovy and nim do too) other programming language has is whitespace for blocks rather than visible braces (or even BEGIN/END ala Wirthian languages). That's something much like line numbers in classic BASIC that introduces a roadblock when learners move on from it.
Local models that run on a laptop (not even needing a "cluster") are already better than ChatGPT from a couple of years ago. Yes, Claude and ChatGPT today are certainly better than these local models, but they can't keep getting better indefinitely -- there's only so much info to scrape. When they hit a plateau, it is only a matter of time that consumer hardware will catch up to it.
At the time (1948), lynchings of Black people accused of crimes (or just not suitablely "humble") were still practiced in the South and some people seriously defended the practice as part of Southern tradition.
It's complicated because besides the ones in the Middle East, there was also one in the 1200s in France against the Cathars -- a "heretical" sect of Christianity that was into gnosticism/dualism
Wilkins Coffee (which gave employment to a young Jim Henson before Sesame Street or The Muppet Show) was quite successful with its implication that people who don't drink Wilkins get shot and suffer other misfortunes. Maybe having puppets do it was just more charming.
Unless they are very popular books, they will be weeded (thrown out or or sold) in a matter of a few years though. People imagine that libraries are infinite storehouses of material, but except for places like the Library of Congress they really aren't. There is limited storage space, and in order to get new books they need to discard the old ones that were rarely checked out. Even the example of old books on parchment aren't immune to this trend -- the books we have from Ancient Greece or Rome are just the really popular ones that were copied over and over again, and the vast majority of works from those times are lost.
Yes, but getting an unlisted number was considered weird and against the norm even if possible. Even in the early 2000s when I dropped my landline, my parents were aghast - "if you do that, you won't be in the phone book! How will anyone get in contact with you?"
I'm not a fan of sports betting, but surely you can see how betting on a game is not the same thing as betting on a war? People generally don't die because of a sports game (although it happens rarely).
I've actually done something similar with a cheap $50 Amazon Fire tablet -- I installed F-Droid and Termux plus Unexpected Keyboard (software keyboard that has ctrl, alt, tab, and other important techy keys) -- It is actually pretty fun to use for light coding.
Maybe. There are certainly people in all fields who are book smart and did well in classes but are useless at actually practicing their field (not to mention people who cheated in school and got away with it and aren't even that), and it is worth filtering them out. But I think it is weird that CS expects good workers to have these passion projects. Do we expect civil engineers to build bridges in their back yard on the weekends? Can't someone just be good at their job and have other interests outside it?
While I know people understandably dislike Onyx Boox for their disregard for the GPL, their Android-based e-ink readers are exactly this. Their built in reader has offline dictionary support of its own, but as they are Android devices (albeit an older version and with a bit of hassle to get the Play Store on it besides their limited store), it can run standard Android apps -- I use it for both ebooks and for reading magazines from my library with Libby.
The idea that LLMs are useless "bullshit machines" is very 2022. We live in the world today of 2026 where Donald Knuth and Terrance Tao, neither of whom have any patience for hype, use LLMs to help them craft mathematical proofs, I get not liking AI, and getting more satisfaction by doing things oneself. I get frustration on how the AI boom has caused the RAM and graphics cards we want to buy to become unavailable/unaffordable. I get concerns over how such technology is being used by the police and military. But in 2026 the attitude that they are useless "bullshit machines" is as absurd as the articles in the early 2000s that still claimed the Web was just a fad that could be safely ignored.
Even in LA it's quite possible to live without a car if you live in the right neigbhorhoods like K-Town or any other centrally located one where both the Metro and buses are plentiful. LA's a huge place with varying amounts of density.
While I recognize many of these, I had no idea about the IBM Academic Operating System (a version of UNIX for their RT RISC workstations distinct from the normal IBM version AIX). There are just snippets of info about this OS on Wikipedia and other sites -- I wonder why IBM created it when they already had AIX.
There is actually a phrase "free library" commonly seen in older libraries often called a "Carnegie Free Library" because they were created as a philanthropic project by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. They are called "free libraries" because many libraries in the 19th century were businesses run rather like video stores (if you can remember those) where you had to pay to check out a book, while Carnegie's were free of charge.
My first gig at 18 was managing my university library's database (in dBase III; it was the 1980s) and writing the user interfaces for searching. This was a pre-SQL database for you youngins in case you have no idea what I'm talking about.
The current US minimum wage is so way below market wages in most places to be meaningless, though. I'm sure McDonald's would like to hire people at $7.25/hr (or better yet have robots that they don't have to pay after acquiring). But currently, they have to advertise that their starting salary for workers near me is $14/hr because if they don't they won't get anyone. Politicians like to talk about raising the minimum wage to $15/hr or whatever as if that would suddenly give working class people a huge raise, but it would simply reflect the existing reality.
I live in the DC area and it is kind of sad that a lot of people here haven't been to the various Smithsonian museums (which are free) here, or haven't been since they were children.