There were also conversion utilities built into various versions of Windows both to convert FAT16 to FAT32 and FAT to NTFS. There are plenty of videos out there of people upgrading versions of Windows all the way from 1 to 7, 8, 10, 11, whatever is current. It ends up pretty messy by the end but technically works.

As far as memory management, while DOS was a mess by Windows 95 you could get away with not really ever touching it if you didn't want/need to. If you still had some higher-complexity DOS stuff to run you might have to manually mess with it a bit but you could mostly leave it alone.

Part of the big question of current "AI" systems is how much of their output is based on prompts, training, and other inputs from the user(s) vs. something that is clearly directly programmed/manipulated by a person. A person playing a guitar is clearly the direct creator of the music with the guitar as the tool. Synth music is generally created either directly by being played like an instrument, or programmed directly by the musician using programs to specify notes, instruments, lengths, etc. I don't think most people would dispute that the person is the creator in those cases since the output is based on the exact input of the user. Even in the case of somewhat more complex things like 3D printed objects or, say, a fabrication robot that's creating/building things you still have a person/people directly designing something or programming it for a specific output.

"AI" is a little trickier since there's usually more separation. If I tell an AI "Create a musical piece in the style of Mozart" or "Design a machine to lift 50 pounds vertically while maintaining stability" and it comes up with something, who is the creator? The person asking the AI? The people who designed the model? The owners of whatever the model is trained on? The company or person that owns/runs the AI, whether the software itself or the hardware running it? The AI itself? Are the outputs copyright violations of what it was trained on if it was trained on copyrighted material? Or should potential patents be derivative of whatever other patent information it was trained on? If the AI itself can't patent a machine or innovation, then who can or does? Or does it immediately become permanent public domain since there's now prior art, assuming its something that would otherwise be granted a patent? Lots of annoying legal things to work out that may or may not align with common sense, since legal stuff rarely does. We haven't had a lot of precedence established yet about these sort of things.

Linux is pretty well supported on Commodores at this point. Sometimes the kernel versions lag behind a little bit but there's versions of 6.x for Amiga working. Most of the focus tends to be on accelerated and modified machines, as well as more modern m68k variant chips, but there are plenty of people keeping it alive even on original hardware.

I actually ran into this a bit with my car (Scion FR-S, technically a Toyota?). It did indeed have a slightly smaller than stock replacement battery and the previous owner had either lost or not tightened down the battery clamp properly, and it was gone. This let the battery rock back and forth, with the battery terminal banging off a strut tower brace. The terminal cover was a pretty simple little clip on thing, and had clearly been knocked off or come off somewhere along the line. Maybe from banging on the brace. I'm not sure if I lucked out because it hadn't quite gotten through the paint enough to short out or was such a momentary contact it didn't cause any problems (and hadn't welded itself to the brace). In any case, definitely could be a problem for any car with different sized batteries than stock.

Their heyday is probably past at this point, but for many years there were whole youtube channels and even entire creator networks devoted entirely to Minecraft content because of the sheer amount of hours watched of it. It took awhile to get going but a lot of stuff was appreciated and praised for a long time. I've seen some arguments made that Minecraft content was such a huge percentage of youtube consumption overall for awhile that it was a big contributor to the dominance that YT has today.

I doubt we'll ever get back to that point but poking around un-logged-in youtube it looks like there's still some MC out there getting decent views.

Depends on your goals and what you enjoy. It's entirely possible it's just not the game for you, which is fine too. Everybody has their preferences and likes/dislikes with games.

As far as Minecraft goes, it has a few different gameplay loops. There's a whole survival aspect where you build defenses to protect against bad guys. Maybe do that in interesting and unique places like the nether. There are bosses and an endgame as well for people to work towards.

Some people like redstone and making complex automated machinery with it. Even without mods there's a fair amount of interesting factories, machines, sorting, special effects, etc you can do with it.

Others enjoy the building - maybe they make a replica of a giant cathedral, or the USS Enterprise in 1:1 scale, or a whole city, or their own house. Basically a virtual lego set.

Plenty of other things too. Social aspect where multiple people can hang out and chat with some extra stuff to do while doing so. On mobile it's probably one of the better experiences that isn't a completely shitty p2w/mtx laden mess. It can be a great way for parents to play games with younger kids. Tons of interesting mod packs that can transform it into various things whether it's single-block challenges, Factorio-esque automation games, fantasy swords and sorcery RPGs, whatever you want.

Anyway, nothing wrong with it not being your thing, but there is genuinely a ton of different things you can do it in that a lot of people really enjoy.

At this point I feel like these companies ought to just offer this monitoring for free and be done with it. I think I have three different credit monitoring services I'm getting for free due to various breaches and compromises. And I've had them for years without ever paying for them because it seems like every couple years there's another breach of something where they throw in monitoring for a year. Equifax, T-Mobile more than once, a previous company of mine's employee database, Xfinity breaches more than once... it's endless. I've taken other precautions with my credit so I've never had any problems, hopefully it stays that way.

They can mostly ignore the hobbyist pirate that installs a copy or two on their gaming machines with hacked activations because they're not much revenue anyway. Running Windows un-activated these days is a fairly mild inconvenience too if you aren't big on customized colors and stuff, so that's not a huge deal either.

But, Microsoft can still make decent money on OEM licensing agreements as well as business/volume sales with accountability there should a business choose to not license their stuff. They probably couldn't care less about randos messing with on their personal machines, it's more about the bigger deals. Although to be honest I don't actually know what the licensing implications would be if, say, a business decided to deploy a whole zoo of PCs with unactivated Windows on them. I'd imagine there has to be legalese in there about commercial/business use of it.

It shouldn't be necessary, but you can get/make thin little 3d printed inserts that let it use the in-between settings. Fortunately the middle setting works fine for me but I've had a few friends struggle with it. Hopefully they do fix it.

That's my understanding, or at least what the big fear was. If a studio used AI for the majority of initial work trained on writings of big-name (read: expensive) screenwriters and then used cheap staff writers to clean it up and tweak things where needed, and then didn't have to credit the original screenwriters who made the content the AI was trained on, there were questions over copyright and ownership and credits.

I'm not going to get into the arguments about the state and quality of modern screenwriting, but as I understand it that's the basic arguments. Writers had a concern they'd be replaced by AI, and wanted concessions to ensure they'd still get credit and compensation for AI output derived from their work. We're seeing similar strikes and concerns from actors and voice artists.

Hue used to be one of the few "Major vendor" smarthome things that actually worked completely locally and disconnected if desired and played pretty nicely with other stuff, but also had decent integrations with other things if you wanted to. It's disappointing that it's gone this route, but not entirely surprising sadly.

I was able to find the full article elsewhere, but it doesn't have much details just yet. It seems like it means that if an AI model is trained on a writer's work, that writer would get partial writing credits for it. Presumably any humans working on it would get it too, but it ought to prevent a studio from doing something like, say, training an AI on all past Tarantino scripts and then using it to produce a Tarantino-esque script without credit or compensation. That's the way I interpreted it anyway.

Whether AI use in this stuff is a good or bad thing or not or whatever I'm not going to try to editorialize, but it is what it is. At least this way there's some protection for writers, but I guess we'll see what happens if they try to make hybrid models, unique models not attached to any existing writer somehow, or whatever.

Is this the latest evolution of Zawinski's Law? (Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.) It seems like everything is slowly incorporating python one way or another.

Part of it is fleets of autonomous cars could communicate with each other to better handle positions, traffic, incident, and flow. It's a lot easier for a car to know what's around it if it's getting constant "I'm right here, I see you're over there" kind of updates from other cars. Or if an accident or breakdown happens a car can send a warning out so that cars behind it could react faster than something purely visual/radar/lidar. Whether that needs 5G or not is certainly a valid question (some kind of short-range point to point/mesh wireless system would likely be sufficient) but there's also benefits to had with pulling map updates, traffic updates, road closures, etc etc from a central source as well.

Autonomous doesn't necessarily mean disconnected, just acting on its own outside human control.

Along with everything else already said, a lot of tech companies make their office culture, perks, swag, and the like a bit part of the reason to work there. I've worked for a couple smaller tech companies with a lot of the stereotypical things like video games, pool tables, free beer on tap, free sodas and snacks, catered lunches every day, etc etc and a lot of people were drawn to working for the company specifically because of perks like that.

Without that, a lot of companies lose their differentiator that makes employees want to work and stay.