Porn stars. At least back when I quit WP, one of the things that sent me over the top was that every minor porn star (especially female) apparently deserved their own page, while scientists didn't even if they had numerous published articles and citation and done important work - but their field was nothing famous.

In theory.

If you follow actual notability discussions, they are largely about "this isn't important".

The deletionists are one of the reasons I stopped contributing to Wikipedia. It's not like you need to fit into a 20-volume print edition, idiots. You can give every damn porn star who's been in one clip you liked their own page, why not everyone else? For all I care, every human on the planet could have their own page, and every house with a story, and every dog and cat.

Just imagine if the amount of time and energy spent on the deletion discussions alone would go into improving WP instead.

Or, you know, you could use the time to do something about the people hogging their favorite page and considering it their property and reverting everyone else's edits just because it wasn't made by them. Or one of the other dozen issues the site has. But no, whether or not Xav deserves a page, that's what needs discussion. Fuck off.

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.

Unfortunately I've found that no single search engine does a particularly good job anymore. I end up searching in Duck Duck Go, Google, and even Bing of all things because they all do a crap job of returning good results now.

I suppose if altavista.digital.com was still working I'd try it too.

Yes, but not for you and me. Graphics designers have been using stylus-displays for years and years, because it's great to draw on the thing you are making instead of drawing on a different surface like a Wacom.

But I'm like you, I don't have a use case for a touchscreen and if you touch my notebook screen I'll be angry because I prefer it without fingerprints, thanks. So my first question is: Do they offer this thing with OLED but without touch? I guess not. Pity.

I've been slowly moving towards my dream setup: Solar panels, battery, EV car, island mode capability. This is one thing that'd be a factor in my buying decision. Using your car as a battery or secondary battery is a big plus, and if they built the necessary equipment to run independent of the power grid, it'd come in a neat package.

While power failures are rare where I live, I expect them to become more common with the move to renewable energies. I support that, but it's more fragile than constantly running power stations. So being able to run your home at least for a few hours on your own energy is something that I consider a good idea.

You missed the point.

A friend of mine made a tea-timer app for the iPhone. Where you enter what tea you are making and it sets the correct number of minutes. Today, people would ask ChatGPT before they go on the App Store to search for something like that. That's the point. Not what YOU would do, but what the general public does. And for Jane Doe, ChatGPT has replaced a lot of these specialty apps.

Skills are great until they aren't. The problem is exactly what you say: You can literally create a skill by telling the LLM to create a skill. Which is... why the f do I need to make a skill if the AI already knows how to do it?

Properly created skills, that include reference material, specific instructions, and expert knowledge the LLM doesn't have or that's buried somewhere under 10 layers of reddit posts is genuinely useful. But most skills aren't. I'm constantly underwhelmed by hyped-up skills that, when I look at them, turn out to be bland, basic instructions.

well, their chips are coming out of a foundry after all...

Not sure about the assembly of small electronics. It looks like that's still a fairly hands-on, manual process.

One of the barriers to automating the assembly of commodity microelectronics is that the revisions iterate fairly quickly. It's difficult to build an automated assembly line that can handle those changes. It usually just ends up being easier to have a person do that assembly work if the product is going to change in a few months and it would take a couple of months to retool for the change.

A broken clock might be right a couple of times a day.

Unless of course someone rips the hands off. Or if it's a digital clock that simply doesn't display anything. Or probably for a bunch of other possible reasons.

MTBF calculations are a bit of a scam in of themselves.