So I don't play that type of game. Has anyone here played those, and had the gambling feeling over these loot boxes? The summary is rather damning, but I'd like the opinion of an adult gamer.

It's not just powerbanks that have unnecessary features. Chargers are affected too: the new Anker Nano 45W (A121D) doesn't support AVS, and PPS is limited up to 16V (not 20, what most laptops want). But it has a smart interactive display... you could argue that the old version is better.

Okay, but you have to admit it's useful to distinguish between the intelligence that AI seems to display, and that humans seem to display.

Mod parent up, very insightful summary.

It's a great feature but what's weird is that "Live Translation with AirPods is not available if you are in the EU and your Apple Account Country or Region is also in the EU." https://support.apple.com/de-d...

I wonder if that's more than coincidence?

I've been programming assembly since the 1980s... I got so bored waiting for work lately, so I solo wrote an entire operating system in the past few years, as well as writing three assemblers and building an emulator.

The problem isn't that there aren't any assembly programmers anymore. The problem is that the market either doesn't pay them enough, or expects a high concentration in one location, which just isn't practical - and wasn't practical even in the 1980s.

In fact, the market spent so long trying to learn how to work without assembly programmers that all of us who did it professionally ( a very small group - we knew each other ) all went off and took other jobs elsewhere.

I haven't programmed assembly for an employer since last century, and although I still do it contract, to be honest the customer couldn't care less what language I use as long as they get the outcome.

Being an assembly programmer doesn't lead to work. Being an assembly programmer who lives close to an employer who wants assembly language programming is what leads to work, and locally all they want is late generation programmers, who take weeks to write in a modern high level language what I write in a day in BASIC. And the BASIC version outperforms the modern version ( ie, I write the POC in basic, it works perfectly and interfaces with the APIs without a hitch, then they write the new version in a different languange and now it's running poorly - so badly the job got cancelled ).

So I just do different work now, waiting for my retirement and I only program assembly in my spare time for a single customer who does work I personally support, who probably has no idea at all I'm working in assembly.

But I'm not in the US... In Australia.

There's still lots of ASM programmers. Try the Vintage Computer Federation if you want US citizens. Lots of retired programmers there who might help you.

This seems perfect for education. We give the students a Raspberry Pi, a breadboard, an SD card and an image. And we want to include some libraries on the image so they can play around with a couple of electronics components. This seems quite useful for that.

I have the feeling that these hardcovers are gifts. And like you said, if you buy it for yourself, you get the paperback because they're actually more compact, lighter etc.

Like you, I used to visit more frequently. I'm amazed it's still going. People used to blog here, too :-)

Plato had all of the hallmarks of an early World Wide Web. Except that it was too proprietary and that's what killed it.

It the early 80s, it mixed text and graphics, and had a resolution of 512x512 so that you could send vector graphics as small codes down serial modem lines at 1200 baud and it was still viewable. The Star Trek graphic logo you see on some examples is just a glimpse - it was amazing for graphics even at it's time, and people who weren't around at the time would fail to notice that it occurred at a time when almost all computers were only capable of text display without any detailed graphics like that - even the frame buffer was absolutely unthinkable for it's era, and high end business PCs sometimes struggled with things like 160x75 resolution graphics.

And it was FAST - Way faster than early web services which didn't come out for well over another decade.

Not only was it multi-user, but through it's programming language, called TUTOR, you could have multiuser chats going on, or monitor an entire classroom of remote students, see what they were seeing, break in and help them, and assist with their lesson directly, then hand them back to whatever they were doing at the time, no matter who wrote the lesson.

I wrote somelike like IRC (relay chat) for it - using the capability to cause a predetermined error in a users input that would flush their input buffer to common memory, allowing my program with minimal permissions to capture their buffer, and display it on everyone's screen before repeating - Up to six people could share in real-time chat. It wasn't just popular - it spawned an entire group of users who just wanted to talk to each other via the screen, especially as the built-in chat had been disabled to prevent use as a conversational capability for users.

Unfortunately, my program went absolutely viral and usage eclipsed every other application. I'm told use of the chat program I wrote consumed over 99% of system resources, because, strangely enough, people just wanted to talk to each other ( this was localized to institutions in a single state - not other PLATO networks ) which led them to shut down the system as they felt it wasn't being used for educational purposes, which tells you something about the mindset of the people who operated the pilot PLATO network in my state. They should have embraced the viral popularity of the free chat program I wrote and used it to fuel interest in the other capabilities the system had to offer. But, well, the virus that affects academia of late was already well set in place even back in the early 80s. The system admins loved my work, but the powers that be had an agenda, and apparently I interfered with it.

What happened? Who knows exactly, but Plato was shut down and I was kicked out of the university for failing to get any marks in my courses ( A big ZERO ). I already had enough points to pass my bachelor's degree units at the time, and somehow they all disappeared. The first time it happened, I had a copy and went into the university admin office and the administrative staff fixed it. The second time it happened was before they sent me a copy of my current course marks, and I was kicked out. Coincidence perhaps? Not very likely. It had all the hallmarks of malicious activity although I had upset other educators at the time by correcting them in class so it's not impossible for it to be related to other matters. I guess I never learnt to keep my head down and universities don't like students who stick out.

But the idea of embedding vector graphics and text along with touch screens and an advanced multiuser learning environment was amazing at the time. This was well before most computers could show photographic images on-screen. PLATO was incredible. A harbinger of where the Internet was going to go in the near future and what it would become.

I find updates intrusive, problematic and cause lots of issues.

The idea that windows critical functionality gets turned off to force you to update is just wrong... Notice your computer won't launch some programs, or some functionality is missing? Sound gone? Devices don't show up? Then magically everything works after the update, but it also worked before the update was pending so it's not the update that fixed the issue.

Heck, I'd even make that $50 just to turn off updates and make them completely manual.

Microsoft knows this market exists, but strangely has never offered this service.... I wonder why.

Believe it or not, but I wholeheartedly subscribe to this philosophy. Anyway I think I didn't explain well. The generated podcast would first start about "this region is beautiful, but I also think it's important to think about being responsible for nature". And then what happened, they didn't actually talk about what they DO, but instead would repeat variations of the theme. The sentences themselves would sound fine, but the whole conversation would actually be nonsense.

A friend of mine is building an app centered around hiking, a subject I'm mildly interested in. So he sent me a file called "podcast.mp3" without any comment, so I figured he found it interesting and wanted me to listen to it. So I did, and I thought to myself, what a weird conversation. They talked about this particular (existing) region, but they started droning on and on how it wasn't just about hiking but also being about responsible for nature. No sane person would talk like that, and when I figured out it was just AI vomit, I angrily messaged him back how he basically wasted my attention like that.

Technically it's a mild miracle. But the output is utter garbage, reurgitated chewed-up nonsense. Do not spend any minute of your time on this generated trash.

I knew Colorware offers painting your AirPods and I tried some to find skin colors, but I was a little disappointed. The only camouflaging color I could find, was some sort of matte pink: Colorware.com