tech-historian

I thought it was obvious. Clearly it was not. Ray Kurzweil is a futurist who has spent multiple decades researching this topic and has written multiple books on it. His bio speaks for itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

It's clear you're not familiar with Kurzweil's work in AI (or his background in general). He's written multiple books on the topic over multiple decades, including the seminal "The Singularity is Near". He's devoted his life to the study of this field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near

Who is the author Kevin Kelly and why does he think he has a greater hold on this issue than luminaries like Ray Kurzweil?

This "recipe" reads more like an arXiv paper than a recipe and I love it. So much thought put in and so thorough.

"It's just pizza, not some priceless work of art"

Isn't that highly reductionist? People derive pleasure from immersion and mastery of all sorts of things. I'd argue that food can make you feel just as much, and probably a lot more emotion than typical art does.

Your assertion is silly. The headline is fine, and this qualifies as news. By your logic, if a US Senator quits, it wouldn't be news because it's only 1% of US Senators?

I'm not sure why this is an interesting stat. I'd argue far more than 51% of global knowledge workers are working remote right now, and have been since the start of the pandemic.

Those melodies were used to fight copyright, not profit from extortion. Different use case.

It's interesting to think about the incentives. Look at the press they're getting. It's at the top of HN and will be fodder on all major news outlets. It was probably an easy slam dunk case for the prosectors.

She only committed some light treason.

It's amazing that:

A) All utilities were functional during the move

B) The building was open to business during the move

C) It was initially moved by hand (before the rotation part)

D) It was completed in 1 month

Simply hurts my brain to think that it is possible to move buildings around, in 1930 no less.

Full article: https://outline.com/2Nf8yA

Yes!

And here's a 1999 Wayback Machine archive of the IE for Unix site on microsoft.com:

http://web.archive.org/web/19991128115223/http://www.microso...

"Internet Explorer 5 for UNIX offers the most complete support of Internet standards and technologies, including XML and DHTML"

If you want some IE nostalgia, here's a visual history of IE starting in 1995 (v1.0):

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/internet-explorer

Factoid: There were versions of IE for both Mac and Solaris.

Back in 2006 an AOL subscriber recorded their conversation with an AOL customer service agent while trying to cancel the service. It was really bad, way worse than this NYTimes process. The NYT wrote an article about the debacle [1] and had this to say about Netflix's great customer service and ease of cancellation, compared to AOL's awful service:

"Seeing how Netflix would be so protective of my time were I to leave makes me all the more unlikely to do so."

Maybe the NYT should take their own advice.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/business/yourmoney/02digi...

News != something being interesting

A visual history of Wikipedia going back to 2001:

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/wikipedia-website

Rukmini Callimachi, the "journalist" at the center of this podcast series, is essentially Scott Templeton from The Wire.

https://thewire.fandom.com/wiki/Scott_Templeton

Has Deepmind ever released how many employees it has? Several thousand seems much larger than I would have thought. Please cite your source on that.

If you're curious what Wikipedia has looked like throughout its 20 year history:

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/wikipedia-website

Well, you get to pay for the privilege. That seems to be the difference.

Your search engine is a spammer's dream. There's a million other things to consider. No thanks.

I did include the word India when I submitted it, but somehow it is gone now...

> "Yaël Eisenstat, Facebook's former election ads integrity lead, said the employees’ concerns reflect her experience at the company, which she believes is on a dangerous path heading into the election.

> “All of these steps are leading up to a situation where, come November, a portion of Facebook users will not trust the outcome of the election because they have been bombarded with messages on Facebook preparing them to not trust it,” she told BuzzFeed News.

> She said the company’s policy team in Washington, DC, led by Joel Kaplan, sought to unduly influence decisions made by her team, and the company’s recent failure to take appropriate action on posts from President Trump shows employees are right to be upset and concerned."

This is pretty damning stuff, coming from named, authoritative sources inside the company. I'm hopeful that the recent advertiser boycott will help shift priorities with leadership at the company, but I'm not holding my breath.

Small factoid. Microsoft's first foray into hardware was the Z80 Softcard for Apple ][, which was a plug in card that introduced Z80 and 6502 functionality. This was in 1980 and cost $365. A premium version also added 16k of RAM to the Apple ][ line.

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...

True. Maybe the human corollary to this is sarcasm. Lots of people fail to pick up on sarcasm in online discussion, hence the /s at the end of a post. And for that matter, natural language parsers really struggle at extracting real meaning from sarcastic texts too.

Clearly Microsoft's focus is on software. But I think you'd be surprised how early they started producing hardware. Back in 1980 they had huge successes in hardware! Starting with the Z80 Softcard and Ramcard.

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...

It's a good point about the definition of tech. I was trying to refer to digital tech companies. But certainly as you go back in time, tech applies to so many industries before the digital age. Automotive, photography, industrial equipment, aviation, chemical engineering, materials science, etc etc all could be thrown into the technology umbrella, so it's important to make a distinction.

The article is an interesting history lesson, but that sub-heading at the top sort of threw me for a loop, referring to Microsoft as "the first big tech company"

Microsoft was, and still is, a giant tech company starting in the 90's and on. But if one looks at the digital corporate landscape back in the 1980s, IBM was an absolute behemoth. Consider this. In 1985, IBM had a market cap of $95 billion. That was more than the next 13 largest tech companies at the time, combined! This other group includes Apple, HP, Hitachi, Intel, Motorola, Sony, AT&T, Texas Instruments, Verizon, Xerox, National Semiconductor, DEC, and Control Data.

It's hard to overstate how powerful IBM was at its zenith.

I only know this because I was curious and looked up the data the other day, and it blew me away.