mikestorrent

Sometimes you want more than text. This is one of the interesting divides these days - and I say this as someone who spends a lot of time in the terminal. Computer interfaces and interaction did not peak with the VT-100. Sometimes, there is a very legitimate need to show tables, graphics, interesting graphs, and to use colour and shade to draw the eye and lead someone through an experience.

This is why I use an IDE instead of a TUI agent... I'm on a computer with a multi-megapixel display, I want to use it. If I could be driving the same process with my Macintosh SE as a serial terminal, what the hell is the point of my recent Macbook?

Step 1 is making back doors mandatory. Step 2 is banning anything they can't decrypt.

I don't know if the second part has been discussed yet, but it's only possible with the former in place, so it makes sense to just ram that in first.

Most people don't care about this at all because they cannot fathom what it actually means. It takes the government actually turning on you to understand at a visceral level and by then it's too late. It seems there have still not been enough historical examples of this to truly burn it into memory.

It's absolutely optional. Why feel any pressure at all to do this? How much FOMO do you really suffer from? There's so much free or abandonware gaming material out there that you could never run out of new things to try without spending a cent... paying per minute is far from mandatory as long as you can still own hardware, and computers are still pretty cheap all things considered.

Does that at some point not cross a line from pleasurable escapism into reality avoidance?

Academic Grant Incinerator

It's a problem for the security, legal, and IT teams, but not that much for developers, unless they get really particular about their harness. On the other hand, these are the high dollar value accounts that providers want to keep; but if there's no reason to avoid switching, this market really will feel like a utility market (i.e. it'll be like switching ISPs or cell phone providers - annoying but fungible).

The AI companies want to differentiate and become something more than a commodity, even if it's as critical as a utility is.

If they drilled down any further they'd reach the interior of the hollow earth, obviously not permitted

Y'all remember TkDesk at all? https://tkdesk.sourceforge.net/

I loved it back in the day, tons of fun to configure with code, somehow friendly enough for me to play with in high school with no background knowledge and only some man pages to help me. Coupled with a lightweight WM like CTWM https://www.ctwm.org/index.html it lead to a really performant desktop on the single-core ~400mhz machines we had in our computer lab....

Yeah we need to see this

Imagine if we actually built a remote application delivery platform instead of cobbling one onto a glorified document reader

This is why I am avoiding the use of agentic identities at my company - agent instances belong to people, act on behalf of individuals, and accountability needs to flow to the person who initiated the request. Letting it wash out in the aggregate is not acceptable (even if there's a hard to get to "paper trail" of audit logs).

I can't understand what the post-docs are suggesting.

moricons.dll holds a very special place in my heart.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250505-00/?p=11...

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6705/what...

I love the detail in these things... icons today don't take advantage of the incredibly high resolution of modern screens, they're just wishy washy corporate logos

From my dabbling with policy writing and legalese, English kinda _is_ a programming language, but one with ambiguity as a first class principal. Sometimes you would like to say something that seems normal at first blush, but gives you the latitude you need to mean something different at the time it is actually being evaluated in a situation that matters. Weasel words, for instance, serve a purpose even if we eschew them. The idea is that it is deliberately NOT formally declaring the exact meaning of something, nor the fact that it is not doing this. How could you really do that in code without calling attention to the very thing you're trying to obscure?

To be fair, there are other accelerators beyond GPUs, and the sooner people broaden out from nVidia and unlock a more open, more competitive ecosystem, the better. Allowing one company to control the flow of such a critical resource is just asking for problems.

Ironically a true statement, eh? It's not a coincidence, the blog's author chose to leave that all in

Look at this fancy lad with his 36.6 while the rest of us are cruising at 14.4

ai;dr

I seriously don't understand what people are doing on a phone that iOS doesn't handle. I'd love to know what kind of interesting use case someone like yourself gets up to.

Thanks for the confirmation!

I've heard that you can get a "0%" vape that has no nicotine in it, but the vape shops I've asked have no idea what I'm talking about or why I'd want it. Any idea if that's real?

Is there a guide to negotiating enterprise software purchases somewhere that doesn't suck? I feel like I am always overpaying.

> Dell's business is incredibly easy to replicate

Your sentence is a tacit admission that you don't have a very deep understanding of logistics and integration and what it has taken for Dell to build the deep supply chain they have. Yes, it's a commodity system; that's the point; but it's still leagues better than a Supermicro, right? Think about the difference there and why people still shell out for a Dell instead of a Supermicro or Exxact or plain whitebox hardware. There's a lot to a solid Dell server that you might not realize, from disk controllers to iDRAC....

Quick to produce, emerges in vast quantities, and getting hit with it can consume all your attention immediately

> It's hundreds of bucks + a monthly subscription for... what, exactly?

Once upon a time I thought this kind of thing would be needed for accurate hand tracking for VR applications, in lieu of a full glove, but it seems to not be a major use case.

All those John Smiths out there are laughing at me

You may have forgotten that the world is driven by screenshots, and so a screenshot of a picture with the `(X) Verified by Apple to be Joe Schmoe` tacked on will be just as good as real verification for a lot of people.

What we need is almost something like the classic "press C+A+D to log in" or the idea of "above the browser pane"... something an image cannot show you unless it's legit. Perhaps a personal thumbprint icon that is different for each viewer, so you know its your device telling you that something is real and not just some mock fake thing?

I've tried some abliterated models. So far, they're not evil - you can make them say evil things, but they don't leap right to it without a bit of pushing. Or perhaps I'm not asking the right questions...

The problem is indeed people. How do we make the default choices most people make, better?

Consider that a lot of people will be very happy to ask an AI what to do when in the past they may have taken no advice at all. It's a hell of a burden but also a wonderful gift. If anything, progressive countries might eventually want to guarantee some basic AI access for people of all income levels.

It might be a matter of choosing which apocalypse you'd like. The non-AI state of affairs is not exactly super compelling on a long timescale right now.