Also assigned reading in Michael Mahoney's course on the history of science and technology at Princeton circa 1984. Although I had read it already -- and found it inspiring.

RIP Tracy Kidder.

And also RIP Professor Mahoney who died in 2008 at the relatively young age of 69 -- just when a historian is typically getting very productive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://www.dailyprincetonian....

"Histories of Computing"
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/bo...
"Computer technology is pervasive in the modern world, its role ever more important as it becomes embedded in a myriad of physical systems and disciplinary ways of thinking. The late Michael Sean Mahoney was a pioneer scholar of the history of computing, one of the first established historians of science to take seriously the challenges and opportunities posed by information technology to our understanding of the twentieth century."

It's going to be a rough next decade with ongoing loss of pioneers of personal computing and those who wrote about them or who inspired them. People like Steve Jobs and Doug Engelbart and Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon who have passed on years ago. Glad that Steve Wozniak and Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and so on are still hanging in there! A heartfelt thanks to all of them for giving us possibilities -- even if we may not be doing great things with them right now.

"Original architects [Wozniak] of the personal computer hate what it's become..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Steve Wozniak says he's "disappointed a lot" by AI and rarely uses it"
https://www.techspot.com/news/...

We can build wind and solar farms or if we put them next to cities we don't care about nuclear power plants so it's at least possible to meet energy demand even if it's unlikely as long as the right wing are in charge since as always who's going to pay for it right?

But you can't magic water out of the sky. Climate change is fucking up the water cycle. So we are in a drought and that is probably going to continue.

Data centers want fresh clean drinkable water and they want to fill it with deadly chemicals because that's the cheapest way to cool their data centers. The chemicals are necessary to prevent the water from gunking Up their cooling systems however it means you can't recycle the water. The data center could recycle that water but that costs money and they are already blowing through it like crazy.

Even if individual people still have water in their pipes, which is by no means a guarantee anymore, farms are going to be short on water and that means food prices are going to go up. And that means the price of everything goes up because you have to pay people enough money that they can eat enough calories to at least survive or they start to get violent.

And yeah I'm sure there's a bunch of people who own guns looking forward to occasionally getting to shoot somebody in cold blood. Most people I know who own a lot of guns think that sounds awesome.

But when it's not just the occasional punk kid but is a systemic problem what you're going to find is was hungry people find themselves a demagogue and organize themselves into a military and they come at you. And your stash of knock off AK-47s isn't going to stand up against a organized military force of any size.

Remember you have to shoot every single one of them but they only have to shoot you once.

Yeah, I would assume most "smart TVs" require an account for the "smart" part, which is only an issue if you make usage of the smart part mandatory.

Roku TVs need a Roku account, for example.

This is an article which raises alarm bells over something quite normal and, given "smart" just means "Can run apps from the cloud, so will need some kind of cloud account", actually quite reasonable. It's only unreasonable if your HDMI ports are locked if you don't sign in.

Mozilla is rapidly becoming the Democratic Party of the open web. Completely oblivious to its reputation or the real world, always capitulating to the pro-corporate pro-control side of the Internet represented by Chrome's Republicans, and completely unaware that its unpopularity is because it will not fight for openness, open source, and threats to the open web like the AI LLM industry.

They're just awful.

I hope, ultimately, enough moment gets behind one of the forks, probably LibreWolf because it's genuinely not corporate, for control of Mozilla to be taken away from them.

This is part of what Colbert wants to fix. His proposed film will cover the largely-omitted chapters 3-8 of The Fellowship of the Ring, including the barrow wights and Tom Bombadil.

> It's literally in the OP. It's not the AI that is at fault, it's the person who's job it was to sanity check to output. That person didn't do it.

No, it's both of their faults.

The AI generated a wrong answer. That means it's at fault.

Nobody checked the answer. That means the person responsible for checking was at fault.

If the AI generates wrong answers, they don't suddenly become right by virtue of someone else not checking it.

Yes, using a bot to delete posts will guarantee you look like a bot. That's the problem.

Touché! Good point on "actually" and whether it is qualified, thanks. I guess that word only fits in relation to there actually being a novel which I was referring to? But I agree I should have worded that better. The word "fictionally" might have been a better choice? Glad your comment sparked some tangential discussion by others.

There's that too. And that adds more problems.

The recommended way to delete all your posts (recommended by privacy advocates, not Reddit) is to edit them to be garbage, and then delete them after that.

The only tools that can do that for you automatically with your likely thousands of posts will almost certainly flag every bot detection algorithm that's written properly.

No, I'm talking about Google's reCAPTCHA. It's blocked me at least twice. The only way to find out is to change over to the audio reCAPTCHA where it'll tell you you're blocked, otherwise they (sadistically, because nobody other than humans would actually suffer here, so this is more evidence Googlers are shit people) lock you in a loop of visual reCAPTCHAs with no feedback beyond "Try again".

The mods don't block a lot of the box because they want the engagement to grow there forums. Reddit doesn't mind the bot engagement either the problem they're having is that it's become so obvious that it's infecting their data sets and their advertisers can't pretend anymore that the leads they're getting are worthwhile. So they have to clean things up a bit or their business model is at risk

Modern bots can get past most captcha unless it's a huge pain in the ass that starts to impact users.

Reddit has a problem where it adds too much friction it loses users because it's not as useful as site as Facebook.

I'm an introvert so Facebook isn't my thing but people I know who are extraverts or just want to find hobbyists with the same niche hobbies make a lot of use of Facebook to do that. And it does work for that purpose.

But Reddit doesn't have any of that and the bots have kind of made the discussions almost useless.

Honestly I would love the bot spam to go away. Because a lot of the political forums require accounts with high karma and long tenure non-political forums get really low effort shit posts like hey remember this game from your childhood isn't it great upvote me!

So it kind of wrecks any meaningful discussion or nerding out.

The trouble is all that is good for engagement so nobody really wants to take it out completely. What Reddit really wants is to be able to tell the bots from the real people so that they can continue to sell the data the real people generate and advertise to them

LLMs have made CAPTCHA basically useless. Not to mention the fact I have been flagged as a bot by reCAPTCHA regularly (I guess "Uses Linux and Chromium or Palemoon" makes me a bot even though I did fucking select all the boxes with bicycles, and then traffic lights, and then the boxes that covered a motorcycle, and...")

At this point it's a tool with false positives that real bots can bypass anyway.

This is the nightmare everyone has been warning about, but the powers that be are too gullible (in the case of AI) and too interested in power for its own sake (politicians) to prevent. Do we really want mass unemployment and business failures because of a giant con job? Even now there are gullible Slashdotters itching to tell me Claude helped them with something therefore the inevitable crash when businesses that got rid of half their employees leading to them have terrible products, poor customer service, and no understanding or control over their own business decisions any more, and no customers anyway because of mass unemployment, is somehow "worth it".

Let me guess you passed the test right? Well I guess that just proves how much smarter you are than I am...