That pretty much sums it up ...

I wish it was more widely used.

Remember - the Federation reserved the Death Penalty for making AI Androids.

Noonian Soong had to exile himself to a remote planet outside Federation control to work on Data and Lore (and his sexbot...).

They needed people to be able to have jobs *that* badly.

Which ... stop sending redshirts outside the ship with magnetic boots in a radiation storm, OK? They could have at least had some astromech droids. Sheesh!

I recently got a "plastic" target that changes color and the holes mostly self-heal if you don't use a hollow-point.

Good for plinking but they do wear out eventually.

I didn't even know this material existed before a buddy told me they were on Amazon. Amazing times, for sure.

Heck, I picked up some 100-lb test fishing line the other day that is some sort of braided heavy-chain polyethylene that is 11 times stronger than steel wire at the same size. The company made mechanical spinnerets to mimic spiders' to get it to work.

Again, I had no idea until a buddy told me it was $20 on Amazon.

Wild.

Back in the day we'd install wild boards that would upgrade the Mac CPU's by a generation or two, add FPU's, etc.

All of this depended on the systems being too expensive to replace or buy new except once in a blue moon.

At $600 which is probably $200 in 1986 money, it's a bit harder to be mad.

Those systems were probably $10K in 2025 dollars. Heck, a few were $10K in 1986 dollars.

I am an XFCE users for many years (Xubuntu).

Gnome is a non starter for me ...

I wish people would try it out.
It is fast, small, and stays out of the way.

No, he didn't deserve it. Political violence is always wrong.

But come on. You have to admit there's a huge amount of irony in the fact that a guy who says a certain number of gun deaths per year are acceptable was the victim of gun violence. Doesn't mean he deserved it, but does cast his words in a new light.

What's so completely hypocritical is that just a few months ago, Baby Vance and Elmo Musk were foaming at the mouth about how Europe lacks freedom of expression.

But unless you publicly state that Charlie Kirk crapped nuggets of sunshine and was the most brilliant person on Earth... you now get canceled in the USA.

*nerd alert*

The original script had The Matrix running in parallel on all the human brains.

Studio execs said that was too confusing and that they should be batteries.

Also Neo is seen on the Nebuchadnezzar with hundreds of acupuncture-looking needles with wires to get his muscles working while he's in a coma.

Writers should have been left alone (a story old as time).

The Earth has frequently been much warmer than it is today and coral reefs grew much faster then.

Perhaps they have a fine point to make but the implications fly in the face of established evidence.

And not shaky evidence - you can go vacation on huge islands made of these old reefs, from when the oceans were higher.

You can go visit Chazy Fossil Reef today and see coral fossils 480 million years old, from when Northern Vermont was a tropical marine environment.

These data aren't disputed in the field.

Throw up a cursive CAPTCHA.

I was 100% C=64 before I transitioned to Apple ][ before I went IBM-PC DOS, briefly Windows/OS2 Warp, then MacOS, then 100% linux, and added Android later.

(sprinkle in some brief CP/M, BeOS, and NetBSD sidequests)

I'll deal with the shift to the next phone platform OK, I think.

I should probably dust off my Pine64 and try the latest builds again. It's been a few years since they were unusable as a daily driver.

Folks, this might be a huge opportunity if you correctly pick the successor and are the first developers.

I love these retro stories from 2012.

What a blast from the past!

This is a retro story from 2012, right?

> Python isn't perfect with its syntactically meaningful whitespace nonsense

I know a programmer with a visiospatial disability.

Braces are fine. Python is literally impossible.

I looked at a few 'Python with braces' preprocessors for her but they all seemed to be half-done and not really usable.

I'm not quite sure why.

It's a dumb reason to shut someone out of an entire software ecosystem. Almost every other language is accessible to her.

I still use and like Perl. Nowadays, I mostly use it for smallish scripts or medium-sized programs, but I have worked on three quite large systems written in Perl. It was fine. If you're a careful and disciplined programmer, you can write Perl that's just as readable as any other language.

The popularity of Python mystifies me. As a language, it's just... meh... it's OK. But the ecosystem is horrendous. Every time I upgrade to a new major version of Debian, Python scripts that use modules I installed by hand in venvs break left and right. What a mess.

Or information on the murder of their whistleblower.