The school administrators, unlike the people who actually make the schools work, such as it is, tend to be paid pretty well.

I get so tired of hearing the school systems stress technology so much, because they are inevitably 20-30 years behind in their understanding of how to best utilize it, leave alone secure their systems. I always fantasized about teaching a computer class that didn't even touch a keyboard for the first half year...

I recall Windows 3.51 was quite secure for the time. But once they merged the DOS branch of the OS with the NT branch, things got a lot worse for several years.

It's good to hear AWS has never been hacked because just about every other company with data has been. A lot of people rely on AWS, and what you are saying is accurate and if they are running their systems correctly, there can be a reasonable expectation that they will be secure. That's nice to know.

> What I learned is that teachers have literally no time for anything.

The school system in the U.S. is notorious for this. Teachers get so much stuff dumped on them, much of which has little to do with actual teaching. It's a truly thankless job that cannot be fixed by dumping more money into the system. It's fundamentally broken. There are plenty of good teachers, but their effectiveness becomes more and more fettered every year.

Source: father of 4, and husband to a school teacher

In my experience the two worst things to combine are "education system" and "technology".

If the script kiddies are hacking your system, you've got bigger problems.

Is "script kiddies" still a thing?

I'm so old.

Far from a MAGA voter, but there were exploding pagers not long ago...

Did you just pick a random person to say that to?

The irony of your sarcasm is it actually *is* horrible.

Water is good - necessary even - but too much water will kill you. Choice is the exact same way - it's entirely possible to have too much of it, as much as that contradicts an ethos buried deeply in the American id.

...probably aren't going to do their research, and will be willing to buy a shittier version for a higher price.

This camera is a fashion accessory for shallow people.

It's a good way of laying off the people who are good enough at what they do that they can find other jobs.

Found the office building real estate investor. Or the sociopath from upper management.

Lol, so many of the posts here reek of bitter developers who have clearly never worked in the halls of quality software engineering

Was there much overlap between the 6502 version and the 8088 version, or did it need to be completely rewritten?

I could see them having a higher level design, which could in theory actually be C code, which just needed to be rendered, er, compiled down to the specific instruction sets. I'm assuming all this assembly was written as assembly, but there could still be a higher-level design, rendered as flowcharts or whatever that was translated for each architecture.

It's a fascinating part of computer history. I miss those days, even though I never actually had my own computer until after I graduated from college.

I do very much understand what you're saying and it certainly adds to the complexity. One cannot put sociological or psychological factors on a box.

That aspect of the problem is indeed going to be much harder to deal with than, say, salt, trans fats, or known carcinogenic compounds.

Honestly, I'm not sure what you can do about those aspects - financial incentives help a little, but honestly I don't believe they make a huge difference - which is why I've concentrated on unsafe levels of ingredients, because although we don't know exactly what those should be, we've at least got a rough idea for some of them. It's going to be a delicate one, though -- you don't want to overly restrict sources of sugar because diabetics can suffer from crashes due to excessively low sugar just as badly as excessively high levels, and some items get unfairly maligned (chocolate, per se, isn't bad for you, it's the additives, and indeed particularly high percentage chocolate can be helpful for the heart).

But, yes, I absolutely agree with your overarching point that the problems are primarily psychological and sociological. I just don't have the faintest idea of how these can be tackled. Jamie Oliver tried (albeit not very well, but he did at least try) and the pushback was borderline nuclear, and that was where there was clear and compelling evidence of significant difference in health and functionality. If you can barely escape with your life for saying eating better reduces sickness and improve concentration, and pushing for changes where these two factors essentially dictate whether a person is functional in life, then I don't hold out hope for change where it's more ambiguous or the economics are much tougher.

There are papers arguing that smoothies aren't as good as eating real fruit because it seems that there's actually a benefit to having to break down cell walls, even at the expense of not getting 100% of the nutrients from it. However, cooking food breaks down cell walls, although obviously not to the same degree. It's not clear that breaking down cell walls is harmful, even if it's not beneficial.

A lot of ultra-processed foods have been accused of having unhealthy levels of certain ingredients (usually sugars or salt) and certain styles of cooking can add harmful compounds.

It would seem reasonable to say that there's a band at which a given ingredient is beneficial (analogous to a therapeutic threshold), with levels above that being increasingly harmful, eventually reaching a recognised toxic threshold. In terms of the harmful compounds from cooking, it seems reasonable to suggest that, below a certain level, the body's mechanisms can handle them without any issue, that it's only above that that there's any kind of problem.

So it would seem that we've got three factors - processing that can decrease benefits, ingredients that follow a curve that reaches a maximum before plunging, and processing that can increase harm.

Nobody wants to be given a complicated code that they need to look up, but it would seem reasonable that you can give a food a score out of three, where it would get 3 if you get maximum benefit and no harm, where you then subtract for reduced benefit and increased harm. That shouldn't be too hard for consumers, most people can count to 3.

Yeah, understood, food is going to vary, since it's all uncontrolled ingredients and processing itself is very uncontrolled. So take two or three examples as a fair "representative sample". Further, most manufacturers can't afford to do the kind of testing needed, and our understanding of harm varies with time. No problem. Give a guidebook, updated maybe once every couple of years, on how to estimate a value, which can be used, but require them to use a measured value if measured, where the value is marked E or M depending on whether it's estimated or measured.

It's not perfect, it's arguably not terribly precise (since there's no way to indicate how much a food item is going to vary), and it's certainly not an indication of any "absolute truth" (as we don't know how beneficial or harmful quite a few things are, food science is horribly inexact), but it has to be better than the current system because - quite honestly - it would be hard to be worse than the current system.

But it's simple enough to be understandable and should be much less prone to really bizarre outcomes.

A fair chuck of the crypto space is "pie in the sky bullshit" with a few rare exceptions where the coin itself has been established as a critical consumable for some other service which delivers real value. But the rest? Memecoins are basically a casino with the added twist of being able to bluff other idiots into doubling down on your bet to your own benefit.

Trump Coin, on the other hand, is not a meme coin. It looks like a meme coin and you're supposed to think of it as a meme coin but it's the first kind: a coin which enables some other service that delivers real value. That value is bribing government officials.

Large purchases of Trump Coin necessarily drive the price of the coin up, allowing Trump or his chosen acolytes to sell their horded coins at a tidy profit. Everyone who holds the coins has a commonly held interest. Everyone who buys them to inflate the price and enrich the holders expects to get something for their trouble and then becomes part of the cabal of holders.

Trump Coin is basically an anti-dollar: it is backed, not by the full faith and credit of the United States but by the political corruption and dominance of the MAGA movement.