They weren't peaceful, but they were introverted. Now, as a matter of survival, they're doing their best to try to drag down everyone else.

So, yes, Damn Trump for provoking this.

That design assumed a dispersed network. The networks have gotten increasingly concentrated. If there's only one connection, you can't route around it.

OTOH, SpaceX might reap large increases in business, because they would be the only route that wasn't broken. (I don't think Iran has orbital capability.)

No, the state of the art was a Sound Canvas. GUS was just for rich folk wanting an incompatible soundcard. The music for DOOM was generally composed using a Sound Canvas, likely an SC-55.

Just like how in the past you'd probably want a MT-32.

Of course, you could also keep Sound Blaster compatibility and just get an AWE series card.

The latest DOSBox staging actually has the Nuked SC-55 emulator incorporated into it (with a warning to remove it if it's part of a commercial distribution due to license issues). But basically everything supports piping the MIDI audio to a real MIDI device or an emulator.

But honestly, 99% of people who played Doom experienced it on an OPL2 or OPL3, or a crappy clone of such. (Imagine my surprise when I realized the IBM ThinkPad my parents got me for University was actually a pretty decent retro gaming machine - having one of the Crystal sound chips that was basically a Sound Blaster Pro on a chip complete with decent OPL3 core. A machine I keep to this day and is basically in mint condition).

Well, not likely. You're right it's not the first speaker to get booed, but the speech for this was probably written months ago, practised for weeks and then given. The fact someone else got booed likely never came up because everyone else was doing same.

Graduation is happening around this time, so a bunch of people will likely be talking about AI. Many of them are likely tech bros who basically are chanting the positive aspects of AI because the benefit of AI goes tot hem. Likely they have been insulated from all the AI induced troubles like people graduating and being unable to get a job, and now people graduating and running into last year's graduates also jobless.

The whole "AI is great" speech works except those graduating have become disillusioned because it's made their job of finding a job so much harder. The whole "let's use ChatGPT to write our essays!" thing wears off pretty quickly when the jobs disappear because "let's use ChatGPT to replace these employees!".

The problem is, it's now too late for many techbros to rewrite their speeches in time for graduation ceremonies.

It's likely because it's stupidly cheap.

A Flock camera is around $2000 installed - and installation is basically sticking a pole in the ground as the cameras are solar powered and use the cellular networks for communication. A neighbourhood HOA can install a bunch for very little cost, which is where they proliferated for a number of years. They were just cheap things to install and use, and many cameras are operated by private companies.

Even the contract the city has likely only cost $100K or less, and likely Flock has them on a service plan where they can install X cameras for that subscription fee. And I believe the police agencies are given access for free for any camera in their network - whether installed by a private company, or city/town/etc.

That's really why they've proliferated. And honestly, they probably would've stayed under the radar save for recent events which revealed less than savory law enforcement groups abusing their access to track people or certain peoples.

One trick that worked in WA state was someone simply filing a FOIA request - it was a properly formatted FOIA request that only requested images from a certain time and place. It went through the courts which decided they were public records, and since it was well formatted and requested and contained they should be turned over. The towns felt that brought up a bunch of questions regarding future FOIA requests and decided to shut down their network to avoid having to answer those questions.

... the World Wide Web. How about just turning JavaScript off? We'd all be the better for it. [Well, except for web developers who can't close an HTML tag to save themselves.]

Then we'd be under attack by CSS viruses.

(CSS is Turing-complete, mind you. It's just a bit arcane to use, but I'm sure AI will let you write the next CSS virus soon enough).

That's only because just before Reagan, companies hired for life. You started as a janitor, and work you way up to CEO. You likewise gave your loyalty to the company - they treat you right, you treat them right.

After Reagan, screwing over the worker became the norm, but people used to the old system didn't change. This affected the boomers and Gen X. Millennials are the first to grow up under the system, learning rapidly that loyalty gets you nowhere and job hopping was the way to go.

Gen Z basically reinforced that, and realizing that companies are going to screw you over, learn to not take crap like working extra hard or overtime to chase after a promotion that likely will never come.

Those lessons are basically filtering down, taught especially during the pandemic.

Some cultures it still exists. Other cultures are seeing it and have movements that basically keep them from being exploited. Japanese workers deemed useless are literally window dressing where they're parked at a desk doing nothing. Chinese youth not wanting to do the 996 crap learned they could just do enough to survive - the cost of living in China is low enough that you don't have to join the rat race - you can get housing relatively cheaply due to oversupply, and food is cheap so you really only need to work a few hours a week.

It'll be a shock to the hardcore MAGA "extreme" folks at X and such who put in lots of hours for DOGE and such and end up basically with nothing to show for it. It's not like Musk would give them anything for working extra hard and extra hours and those political connections will likely be torched or a liability.

You're assuming that everyone is one extreme or the other. And not only is this wrong, there aren't only two sides, no matter what the news says.

OTOH, Flock *seems* to be an example of the "benefits of the surveillance state". I.e., we only hear about the generally approved of uses. If you were to believe that those were the only uses, I'd think you a simpleton. And it's impossible for me to make a decision that they're a good thing without knowing what those other uses are.

What is SQL doing on the list? Everything else is a general purpose procedural language, and then they added in one domain specific query language? If they're going to do that, why not also include HTML, CSS, XML, ...? I bet HTML would be in the top five if they included it.

R is a domain specific language as well - just it's really good for statistics.

The reason SQL is on the list is it's popular and complete. And of what you mention, CSS is Turing-complete and there's many demos of it, including an x86 emulator that can be run completely without JavaScript, or can run a bit more efficiently with it (mostly to provide the clock). (It just needs HTML because Chromium based browsers can't load CSS without it. Firefox can, though).

Python, R and such are big in statistics and math. And both are popular because AI.

If you're looking at the next big web based infection vector, CSS might be one to look out for since not even NoScript will block CSS by default. (It's just arcane).

And for those looking - the x86 CSS emulator is at https://github.com/rebane2001/...

Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.

I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.

Buy the book from an indie bookstore. They exist, and if they don't have it, they can order it from the publisher.

You should know that electronic distribution doesn't save much money - most of the retail price of a book is in the writer, editor, publisher and retailer. The money spent printing it and distributing it is around about 10% of the retail cost in the end. We've made the book supply chain super efficient in that way. Even electronic distribution will only save 10% at most - the costs of the trees, paper, printing, warehousing and transportation.

And Banks is right - his editor deserves quite a bit, but so do people down the line. A writer only produces the text. You need editors to edit the text (depending on the author, this can be significant as it goes through many revisions), typesetters to actually format the text into paragraphs, pages, lists, chapters, and set up the table of contents, indices, etc.If there are illustrations, they need to be drawn and created (writers may sketch the illustration but someone has to make it actually real), etc.

Your local independent bookstore is the best bet for stuff like this, and you may have one closer than you think. They won't have Amazon's selection, but they will have access to be able to order in any book Amazon can get, and many even will ship. You want to support the author? Buy from an indie bookstore. Or get it from a competitor like Barnes & Noble.

And indie bookstores I've found aren't all that more expensive most of the time. Sure sometimes Amazon has a book $20 cheaper off list price so get it there (Amazon is likely taking a loss), but I've seen it where Amazon was more expensive. I'd say 95% of the books I buy come from my local indie bookstore. They know me by name, and the manager even tells me when I show up "I don't think I have anything for you", usually because I choose to place another order with them.

Yeah, we've had grammar checking for nearly 3 decades now. And for the most part it's been mostly useless - tell me if it doesn't complain about anything other than "passive voice" over and over again. Oh, it got better, it gave examples! But it was the same old crap over and over again that I stopped caring about the blue squiggle. I think most programs disable the blue squiggle on grammar errors nowadays.

But I've noticed it in a few places and it doesn't bother telling me what's wrong, but offers me a helpful rewrite to make it better. And it only blue squiggles when it has an actual helpful suggestion on what you can do, offers a potential fix and lets me choose.

And likely to avoid EU oversight as well - remember the EU just ruled that Android must be open against other AI than Gemini. It's possible Apple saw the writing on the wall and wanted to limit what ChatGPT had access to, as well as make a cleaner way to integrate Claude and Gemini into the system as well.

It's also possible that Apple saw what ChatGPT could go and also wanted to ensure that nothing bad happened without user consent. Agentic AIs are routinely pushing into production and breaking stuff. It's one thing if it's your company database or code repository. It's quite another if it's user data that users expect to not be touched.

ChatGPT or Claude deleting your emails are one thing - you gave it permission to do so. Apple users suddenly having all their text messages deleted is quite another. And the risk of agentic AI doing such accidentally or on purpose (through injection attacks) is likely too high that Apple cut back on the integration.

Plus, the whole "ChatGPT Phone designed by Jony Ive" likely had a part of it as well - we know how Apple can be very petty (they banned Nvidia for decades because Jensen Huang spilled the beans on a new unannounced Apple product that Apple was set to launch in under a week. They did allow signing of Nvidia drivers for AI use quite recently).

And the whole anti_AI movement is getting traction

There's no need to find bugs - any linter can find issues.

The problem is the linter reports tons of problems that may or may not be problems. I went through dozens of issues and half of them had to be ignored because the linter ignored a check done earlier. It's not a bug if "If index exceeds 10 this will cause a out of bounds memory access" but the line above it has "if index is less than 10".

That's where AI could help - a linter can find the issues alright, but the AI needs to help filter it down - those nonsense out of bounds accesses are eliminated, leaving only the good ones behind. (And the same linter that found errors like those, also found a very convoluted path through the code that would lead to an issue. So convoluted it took me half a day to figure out what it was trying to say, another half a day to verify that there's a chance those conditions could be true, and half a day to add the necessary condition checks to avoid it, compile it, test it, and get it pushed into the main line. It was a 2 line fix that took the better part of 2 days to figure out.

Also, it may find thousands of issues, but many are redundant and fixing one issue can fix tens of issues that are derived from the one. You know, like how a typo in a variable or structure declaration can generate hundreds of compiler errors, and fixing that one typo turns it from a multipage scroll of errors to something more manageable. If the Ai is prioritizing the one issue that is likely the root cause you might solve dozens more issues along the line.

I am starting to understand the hard core maga mind. It is basically binary thinking. It goes like this: Trump is good. Trump sells phone, phone is good. Others say phone is bad. That means Trump is bad. That is not true. Therefore the ones claiming that the phone is bad are bad. Then the rationalization starts

You pretty much got it. I saw an interview done by a kid to their MAGA parents. They asked if there would be any problems if Trump ordered the nuking of Omaha NE. They said, as long as Trump said it had to be done, they had no issue with it. Not one issue with killing people if Trump said it had to be done. The justification even was "If Trump said it was necessary, then it had to be done".

The cognitive dissonance is huge. When Obama was in charge, all the MAGA congress-people were complaining about high gas prices and how they need to go down. Yet those same people today, with gas prices even higher, say "the Americans understand this is only but tempoerary and that if it goes higher, they don't mind". Even during the Biden era, same thing.

Trump and Obama are just an interesting thing to look at - for some erason Obama lives rent free in Trump's head despite not being president for over a decade now. Even Obama took the better part of two terms to get an Iran deal - it took 5 years of back and forth, and 18 months of negotiating to get a deal that Trump ripped up on day 1 of his first term. Iran's not going to give a deal as good as Obama got (Iran had hundreds of nuclear inspectors crawling around, a number from Israel included. All kicked out when Trump ripped it up).

Nevermind the other issues like Venezuela and Cuba. And with Hegseth basically gutting the US military it's no wonder they need automatic draft registration. (Hilarity will ensue if Hegseth requires you to be white as part of the draft. He wants that show army North Korea has).

It's because of greed, plain and simple. Started in the Reagan era where everyone got gaslit into believing trickle down economics works. Where companies decided to cut today so the CEO gets golden parachute tomorrow.

The problem is, tomorrow is already here.

Youth unemployment is an issue because AI is doing a good job at faking it. If this trend continues, 5 years from now there'll be a pipeline shortage because few entry level people were hired to become the middle experienced worker.

But we can't shove the blame all on Reagan - for Henry Ford encountered the same issue - he wanted to lower the cost of the Model T, and raise wages for his workers. But he was blocked by greed - Ford wasn't doing this out of altruism, he was as cutthroat as they came when it came down to business. Cutting prices on the Model T meant GM, Dodge and others would have trouble competing on price. Likewise, raising wages would mean Ford's competitors would have trouble hiring people. Shareholders couldn't see that, sued Ford, and took the money that would've made Ford and shareholders a lot more money.

The problem is putting the 3 month numbers ahead of the long term prospects of the company. It's why Tim Apple was granted shares over a 10 year period - the better Apple did over the long term, the better he'd do. But he'd also need to keep shareholders happy enough by attracting long term shareholders in it for the long term gains and stability over the short term returns.