I lost a lot of weight after reading "The Hackers Diet" He was a real help to me.

Of all the publicly accessible AI systems Bard is the worst by far. There's no way I'd pay $20 a month for it.

It is unbelievably "woke" and many of the responses to queries that do sneak past its firewall of "we must not offend" are just totally wrong.

Google are a long way behind in this area -- which probably explains why the AI behind all the moderation stuff-ups on YouTube is so bad.

We had no option but to use tape to write-protect on our 128Kbyte hard-sectored 8-inch floppy drives. Oh, we're not going that far back? :-)

I asked it to create an image of an eVTOL flying car in flames.

It responded:

Of course *EVERYONE* who sees an image of a flying car in flames will be "inspired" to recreate that scene in real life.

What are you smoking BARD?

We are all such snowflakes that we must be protected from evil images of scenes that may become commonplace in the not-so-distant future :-(

We recommend using a .22 calibre firearm if you plan to commit suicide. It discharges a less harmful bullet than larger calibres but is still more than enough to kill you.

Sounds straight forward but any time there's mention of an obelisk you should always check for an asterisk (in case there are special conditions that apply) :-)

I've been publishing my daily blog for almost 30 years on my own website -- hand-coded HTML (with all the associated errors).

It still has its own small community of followers and allows me to say what I want, how I want to, when I want to. I don't have to worry about upsetting some mega-corp that is engaged in full-on virtue-signalling and therefore shadow-bans my content or even cancels me completely. The freedom is fantastic -- even though most of my commentary is related to matters of technology and science.

There is still a place for individual websites in this world of X/Meta/YouTube/Tiktok/whatever.

It's not paper vs. screen, per se.

It's just that the screen also gives access to a wealth of information on the Intertubes.

Including many flashy web sites that will assure you that you do not need to waste years of your life studying a particular subject using a traditional textbook, with an organized, well-developed, logical curriculum that introduces and explains each progressively complicated topic, one chapter at a time, in a disciplined manner.

No, all you have to do is take a few quizzes, or solve a bunch of dumb coding puzzles, in order to become an instant Guru, in whatever topic you're pursuing.

Come over to Stackoverflow, and witness this phenomenon happen in real time. Watching all the refugees come rolling in, from various coding puzzle sites, pleading for help in just solving one more coding puzzle for them, before they finally become an instant uberhacker.

Don't blame YouTube... blame creators who use mid-roll ads in their monetized videos.

None of my videos have mid-roll ads so you can watch 20-30 minutes of content with only 2 pre-roll ads and, if you hang around, 2 post-roll ads.

I believe in a fair "value exchange" between myself and those who watch my videos and that means I can't justify including mid-rolls.

For the time being, the choice of whether to litter a video with mid-roll ads remains with the creator if their channel is monetized -- so don't go blaming YouTube when it's greed on the part of the creator -- YouTube is simply providing the opportunity for that greed.

Partly because I don't force viewers to sit through endless midrolls, I have a combined total of nearly half a million subscribers across 2 channels and over 130 million views. I guess I must have got the value-exchange just about right then.

I agree... Philips/Pozidrive screw heads would not have been my first choice for such a task. Even hex-driver or torx would have been superior I would have thought.

Many a time I ended up having to drill out the Philips-head screws on my old motocross bike engines when they wouldn't yield, even to the most concerted attempts to unscrew them with an impact driver. I ended up replacing them with hex-head screws and never had that problem again.

I believe that torx screws have an even better ability to deliver torque with a much lower risk of stripping or the tool riding up and out of the hole.

One can only wonder what the fasteners were made of too. If they used stainless steel then there would always be the risk of cold-welding where the screw sticks firmly to the parts and can even gall with the amount of load involved, if some kind of anti-seize treatment isn't involved. Odds are they were titanium though (for weight/strength) but even that can gall under high pressure.

Google claims to have made over 100,000 drone deliveries in Australia -- and hasn't earned a single cent of revenue, let alone profit.

Google is not a charity. It is not a philanthropic organization and all the "free" services it offers actually have an angle where YOU become the product.

Now consider what Google has to gain by giving away "free" drone delivery...

Will it be using its overflying drones to gather intelligence for marketers? "I see that number 25 willow street has a new swimming pool... let's target them with ads for pool chlorine and accessories" perhaps?

The even more likely situation is that Google (which is primarily an online serivce company) is gearing up to launch a UTM (unmanned traffic management system) that is an air-traffic control system for drones. The FAA has already indicated that this is how they see the future -- a UTM that controls and authorizes all drone traffic in the skies over our heads. Google look to be creating a perceived need for such a system and will likely come in as "the most experienced in drone traffic management" with their pitch to be the company that then controls the keys to the sky for all drones.

The provision of that service could be a *real* money-maker for Google (or Amazon, which is in the same position).

Don't be fooled into thinking that Google or Amazon want to be in the drone delivery business, they don't. They realize that just like back in the gold-rush days, the *real* money isn't in prospecting, it's in providing the critical infrastructure those prospectors need (ie: shovels, pans, food, etc). He who holds the keys to the skies holds the keys to the industry's wallets.

And I recall writing a complete accounting system in Pascal MT+ (the Digital Research compiler) for CP/M machines.

Happy days -- dealing with the limitations of 8-bit processors that forced you to use dozens of overlays (dynamically loaded code) and hand-optimize certain routines to save a byte or two here and there.

Kids today don't know how good they've got it! :-)

So true... I'm pretty sure (at 71 years of age) my eyes are barely HD let alone UHD. In fact, sometimes I think SD looks "good enough".

Age is a bitch... except that sometimes it allows you to use cheaper/older gear without noticing the difference :-)

Haha!

Sony, reap what you sow with your evil DRM.

Yes, there are *many* challenges... not the least of which is that of reliably sustaining the detonation. Think of it as trying to keep a candle lit in a hurricane.

It took a long time for researchers to produce an RDE that would run for more than a few short seconds without stopping, due to the precarious nature of the rotating shock wave and its sensitivity to pressure/density, temperature and other factors.

Going from "we got it working" to "we have a commercially viable product in production" is a huge step.