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Comment Re:They could've called it "P-1" (Score 1) 46

Or from just before "The Adolescence of P-1", there was John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider".

Both of them nailed the idea of migratory programs roaming a network and adding data to themselves.

Ryan's P-1 got the AI part as right as he could have in 1977.
Brunner's "tapeworms" were just really clever coding - the smarts were in the protagonist programmer, which I guess is why the ultimate tapeworm didn't have a name.

Comment Megan McArdle's analysis (Score 2, Informative) 151

is here.

Money quote: But I actually think Google might also have performed a public service, by making explicit the implicit rules that recently have seemed to govern a great deal of decision-making in large swaths of tech, education and media sectors: It’s generally safe to punch right, but rarely to punch left. Treat left-leaning sources as neutral; right-leaning sources as biased and controversial. Contextualize left-wing transgressions, while condemning right-coded ones. Fiscal conservatism is tolerable but social conservatism is beyond the pale. “Diversity” applies to race, sex, ethnicity and gender identity, not viewpoint, religiosity, social class or educational attainment.

Comment What a can of worms they have opened... (Score 0) 309

If you, like the Alabama Supreme Court, think that everything short of a perfect live birth for every embryo is grounds for prosecution, what's to keep every pregnancy and behavior of a pregnant woman free of potential scrutiny, litigation, and potential prosecution? Alabama is sending a message loudly and clearly to every woman: If you find yourself pregnant, get the hell out of Alabama before they decide that you aren't giving that lil' ol' baby inside you proper care and decide to send you to prison for a few years. The sad thing is that is the stated viewpoint of a certain political party and soon people stupid enough to vote for this party will find themselves exposed to this sort of stupidity. Poetic justice? Probably. But then, stupidity has always produced it's own reward.

Comment Re:wireless wired (Score 1) 174

It is reasonable to mock people who don't know something, but clearly think they do, enough that they install security systems with flaws that are obvious to knowledgeable non-experts.

I would mock someone who pretended to read a CT scan, especially if they made an important decision based on their "reading".

Comment It's more than just "predatory acquisitions" (Score 5, Informative) 206

Doctrow says as much in the article:

It's very hard to enter the market when people are selling things below cost.

That is exactly how a LOT of tech middleman companies got started - offer a service below cost, funded by VC money, with the assumption that profits from the service will go up with volume and customer lock-in. Uber, Lyft, all the food delivery services started out like that.

What happens is that consumers get subsidized initially, and get a false idea of the real cost of new services. When prices inevitably go up, that's seen as enshitification when it's more like the law of gravity - what goes down must eventually go up.

This will continue to happen even if we rein in predatory acquisition by big firms.

Comment Re:Just use andriod (Score 1) 65

The "invisible hand" doesn't fail, it just gets chopped off by government intervention. Apple doesn't run the app market as a charity, but the current model is not to charge for apps, instead treat the app as the demo and charge for upgrades. Apple wants a cut of that action. Developers are absolutely free to go back to the old model of having separate demo apps and paid apps where apple gets their cut up front and the consumer pays nothing more. Developers are also free to look at the massive profits from owning an app store and starting their own smart phone company. What they aren't free to do is demand someone else push their app for free.

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