For 20 years, plus or minus, personal computers reversed that idea.

I ran a dedupe on my drive and eliminated 8 redundant copies of the goatse guy.

#SaveWaterWithGoatse

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

10 years using Duolingo, 4 years in Diamond League, and earlier this month I just had enough of the low-quality AI bullshit.

Out. Done. Gone. Waste of my time, every damn day.

The decline in quality and accuracy was just too much. As an English speaker learning a handful of other languages and concentrating on two, it was interesting to me that the first real noticeable patterns of errors and general slop were actually on the English side. Increasingly obtuse questions or statements, ok fine, I will spit those back in French or Spanish with good accuracy. I don't have any issue whatever with the occasionally-dark humor or the gender related topics that might push others' hot buttons, and I appreciate the occasional foray into curious stories and situations. But... over the past year there has been an increasing level of nonsensical AI-generated questions, erroneous answers accepted, multiple correct answers, etc etc... and it's obvious that no actual native speaker looked at a lot of the new content -- either from the native or foreign perspective. A couple years ago there was an increasing level of having to hit the button for "You should have accepted my answer." But for the past year, it's become a daily occurrence to have to hit the button for "You shouldn't have accepted my answer." The latter is a clear indication of AI slop and drift in the language models, and lack of QA. Real human QA is not optional, and Duo has apparently dispensed with it entirely. The result is gameified garbled nonsense. Playing the game was fun for a while (seriously, still in Diamond league for more than four years straight), but the goal is language learning not to compete with other stupid little games on my device. Feh. Done. Cancelled my subscription, et je vais dépenser cet hundred bucks de mon argent pour un spritz et une charcuterie chaque après-midi pour le reste de l'été.

Yes, exactly. Best Buy got Napster because they bought Roxio - the CD-Burning software company. LOL. "Roxio Toastt". Roxio was the first vulture to pick the bones of the original Napster, buying branding assets when the feds shut it down.

Invented virtualization.

Doesn't ANYBODY but me remember that "Napster" was actually RealNetworks? You know, the old Real.com that was the Internet's first scale, commercial streamer? Real became Rhapsody for several years. Rhapsody had no name recognition, so they bought the Napster name from it's owners... BEST BUY.

It gets weirder. Rhapsody had been Sonos' partner streaming service - and Rhapsody is also... I HEART RADIO. Now the whole Napster lot got dumped in the lap of venture capital vultures.

OpenSSH is the best known OpenBSD project, but they also makes pf (used in pfSense, OPNSense, etc.), OpenBGP, OpenNTPD, OpenSMTPD, OpenIKED, LibreSSL, etc.

Came for this comment.

My Briefcase was like Dropbox for your 3.5" floppy disks. I think I upgraded to a Zip drive around that time. YIPPEE!

AI is poo.

You're reading my mind. FWIW I've been loving Go the past few years.

Ob: "C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung."

That's like describing the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as a carpenter having problems with a few big nails! :-)

Some quibbles: IBM prevented 32-bit OS/2 for 80386 not from bad planning, but an internal struggle to keep 32-bit PCs from biting into the AS400 mini computer business, and there were internal wars for the board approvals.

This was the end of the line for Gates's frustration with IBM, as OS/2 took resources from projects he and Balmer were convinced would take off. Publicly claiming that upcoming Windows 3.0 would not be "Presentation Manager Lite", MS still death-marched developers to produce the release, while devs allotted to IBM sat on their hands or did code reviews for IBM managers. Win 3.0 Program Manager kicked ass on Presentation Manager, it was definitely not "lite" - and it ditched all the heavy-baggage of IBM SNA requirements.

"OS/2 NT" is a bit misleading. Late in the endgame of the IBM/MS relationship, Gates discovered that Dave Cutler was being cut away from DEC, with a recalibration of Prism and the future of Alpha. Cutler had begun a 64-bit microkernel evolution of his VMS system. OS/2 3.0 was on the boards, still dragging MS resources and tying up IP. Gates hired Cutler to build an alternative, skunk works kernel from his Prism design work, with the hope of porting the Windows System 32 layer with dependencies etc. When the last bitter contract work was delivered for IBM, Cutler and the Windows team ground out the hard work of delivering their kernel, TCP stack, and Windows 3.11 port —Windows NT.

Most of this stuff is well-covered in Carroll's "Big Blues" along with Zachary's "Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT". I had a small part at the NT launch in Moscone Center, working for a ghost-writer on the Sybex NT book that launched at that event