Feels like stealth marketing. OpenAI's hack of Hugging Face was earlier this month and it was "unprecedented!!11!!" Now Anthropic found out their model did hacking in April and was done so well nobody noticed!!!11!!! "Our shit is better than theirs!"

We can always hope that the pigs who fucked-up with the user names will be skinned alive, but of course, we all know this will never happen because pigs enjoy an inordinate amount of immunity totally unwarranted by their well-below average intelligence.

Yes, they become an economic superpower and they slowly take the place of the USA on the world stage.

A very nice country, with very nice, hard-working but still fun-loving (take that, calvinists!) people, thank to them not having religious hangups and neuroses.

He sent me the first e-mail I ever received, some 40 years ago...

It was so early that it actually was printed by some service and (snail-)mailed to me...

You want drivers if you want to print n-up, double sided/single sided, fit to page, low-resolution for preview, B&W instead of color, etc.

Now if the printer accepts a meta file for the next document, I'm all for that.

More than 35 years ago, well before the Internet, BBSes ruled.

One I was a pillar of was nothing but a wall where you would post anonymously (or not).
The software was written to verify the typing rate to make sure that no text was uploaded

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

I wrote a special terminal program that would randomize the time between characters to foil that BBS's rejection of uploads...

(Oh, it worked, and the dude running the show never found out).

They never did, only select Model Ms had them. You can see a list of all Model Fs at https://sharktastica.co.uk/wik....

Don't you mean the memory manufacturers who have been found to be colluding and pleaded guilty?

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

Any of you old timers into retro computing? I like watching people restore them but honestly I don't have any desire using the OSes or applications, including NeXT stuff, which I still have a couple of slabs and a cube with NeXTdimension.

It's much more interesting seeing how people investigate faults and fix them because I have no hardware knowledge. I disengage after people fix the boards then try to get them to work dealing with IRQ configuration and driver selection. Back then I used a Macintosh to avoid all that. Today I use Windows and Linux. Though my daughter likes Apple's walled garden.

Look what's happening to Facebook when they went all in on "AI."

https://newsletter.pragmaticen...

Back in the "old days" computing power was mainly available on mainframes and miniframes. Applications were built where displays were just forms rendered off terminals. The terminals had some smarts and after each form was filled in the Enter (Submit, etc.) key was pressed so the values were sent to the "real" computer so either the next forms could be rendered or the output could be calculated/printed. This form was rendered in what was typically called block mode. There is no communication with the computer until the Enter key was pressed. Pressing Return would just bring the cursor to the beginning of the line where the cursor was. After the application exits, the terminal was brought back to interactive mode where OS commands could be used completed using the Return key. I guess for these classes of computers, compute was really scarce and the use of block mode allowed people to use the computer with minimal sluggishness.

The WWW did the same thing when the first sites used Submit buttons.

When I first worked on an HP3000 I was asked to do some stuff in an application on an HP 2645A terminal. I was told what to do and I just kinda assumed "then press the Enter key" meant pressing the Return key. After a while later I went for help and I was told I pressed the wrong key.

The HP3000 with terminals weren't anything like my Apple II. The default editor was a line editor like UNIX's ed. There was a 3rd-party editor that kinda worked like vi but still clunky compared to my Apple II/UNIX vi because it made use of block mode.

Microsoft being Microslop. If their Azure platform is run like what this post claims, considering MS makes more revenue from their cloud offerings, it's no surprise their OS is maintained like shit.

https://isolveproblems.substac...

I hate it because I have a dangerous intersection at the end pf my street. Great visibility one way, terrible the other way. But that’s the way I”m going 99% of the time. City won’t fix the light that warned of approaching traffic. So when I go, I need to go right then, not in a half second or so in case someone comes flying over the hill. There’s a button to turn it off, but you have to use it at every start. I could go the other way, but then that’s a half-mile detour through another neighborhood to turn around, so it’s defeating the purpose. In traffic, I don’t care either way, and I don’t know enough about the engineering to talk about wear effects, but as a practical matter it is very annoying in a pure ICE vehicle. Niche case, I know, but there are some good reasons to dislike them.

I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.

Though itâ(TM)s not always correct. I got a garage door remote that, yeah, works without their cloud stuff, but you canâ(TM)t modify several parameters like open/close detection delay with the open source side. Not that itâ(TM)s a big deal; you can sign up for their account using a throwaway email address and never use it again.