From a 1960s comedy:

Interviewer: "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"

Virgil: "Yes, I have."

Interviewer: "Where?"

Virgil: "My aunt has one."

It was an absolutely absurd thing to say in 1967, but in 2026 the joke is about as dated as anything can be. I wonder if young people today even get it.

I don't know when you went larval, but your low uid suggests it was probably a very long time ago. I speculate that a few decades back, a type of tool once thought to be for business (which IBM had earlier predicted had a worldwide market size of about a half dozen) somehow fell into your hands, and you fell in love at a personal level. No? Did I guess right?

In a lot of industries, people learn about tech at work first, and then maybe adopt it personally. But with computers, at least for GenX-and-later, it mostly worked in the reverse: you get a personal computer and master it, and then when you're 18 you show up at a business totally loaded with years of experience and skills.

Why? Because unlike Bessemer converters or bucket wheel excavators or magnetic resonance imaging machines, computers are cheap. All the "capital" (if you can even honestly call it that) you need is just a few thousand dollars at most, maybe even just a few hundred.

The way things have worked in the last few decades (I'd think especially for old Slashdotters) is that the "professional" tool was already very familiar long before you got the job where you work with it. And anything involving cheap electronics is going to remain like that. Unless it's just totally illegal, there's no way millions of people aren't going to have it and use it personally.

Just ban them all in public, except perhaps for people with special needs (who could wear e.g. bright red ones with polkadots -- that nobody else wants to).

All the crap I wrote above was just to say: special needs is everybody. Don't hop in your time machine and tell 1979-me that I can't use a computer, or I'll become a very angry kid, and by 1984 I would consider it an inexcusable Act of War.

Now if you wanna mandate wearable displays be bright red with polka dots, you might get away with that. But don't be surprised if you end up changing fashion itself. Wearable displays don't really appeal to me yet (they haven't been commoditized where I can choose from many manufacturers, all of whose product can run the same defacto-standardized Free Software, just like how an x86 motherboard can) but maybe some day the market will produce a wearable display that I would be willing to use.

If it's bright red with polka dots, then I just might end up losing the black-band-shirt-and-jeans look, and start dressing like the love-spawn of Liberace and Quetzalcoatl, just so my glasses match the rest of me.

searches made through its AI Mode generate less revenue than traditional search

Have you thought about disabling AI Mode and returning customers to traditional search? It'll not only make you more money, but result in happier users too. Everyone-except-Nvidia wins.

Remember when we were all techno-optimists who thought we would end up with 401Ms and even 401Gs? We're as dumb as the flying-car believers.

Will the employee base at companies like Microsoft eventually consist of a bunch of AI agents? With the General Counsel being the sole human, retained for legal purposes?

He was here to save our asses. We should have shown a little gratitude.

Don't give them ideas... Now that the market has surfaces a resource, the elites may start looking at wolves blood now - the wolverine stack.

Just in the last 24 months, Gulf, Iranian, Ukrainian and Russian cloud DCs have been targeted, including different availability zones of the same cloud vendor. So I think it's time corporates and governments start re-recognising the benefits of on-prem data centres. Yes, the old, distributed office-building DCs: halon fire suppression, lit/dark fibre, AC, cooling, giant boxy UPSs and captive power generation - all that. What makes it better now is that computers have gotten a lot more efficient (e.g., die shrinks, ARM solutions), while compute demands of most core business processes hasn't changed (I consider most AI loads are NOT truly 'keeps the business going' core. More like icing on a cake)

...then implement link security checking on employee PCs.

For businesses, tweaking temperature and increasing HVAC recirculation (i.e cutting down on fresh air) reduces power consumption.

So when the AC air in these building is unusually cold, warm or stale:
- at the doctor's,
- at the mall,
- at the cinema,
- at (God forbid!) the hospital! ...should we think of Voltus and Google?

What is Ellen Zuckerman, head of energy market development for North and South America at Google, doing to mitigate the impact on vulnerable on humans? Does she have constraints applied in her spreadsheet model to avoid this? Or has the accountability headache of managing impact just been passed downward to "Where it belongs!"

Do you reckon this was used in the Venezuelan attack?

I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.

I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.

But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.

Only if you upgrade to goldtooth.

Thanks for correcting me. The Slashdot story link I read didn't mention the foot rotting story. Brave guy and good rescue. It may have been better if he took up the initial Russian offer of surrender. It's beyond time to end this senseless war.

You can at least state that foot rotted off story is fiction.

So every kid needs to have a brokerage account now?

No, each kid needs to get an X ("The Everything App") account.