*laughs in public school*

What I do remember most was one of my teachers who clearly was phoning it in every day. He'd read the classifieds looking for motorcycle parts at his desk while the class was doing some boring assignment from the textbooks. Every once in awhile he'd complain about how miserable the pay was, and how if you didn't like his minimal-effort approach to learning, you were welcome to stand in the hall for the duration of the period.

Fun times.

I distinctly remember owning one of these about 20 years ago. Granted, back then smartphones were for business users and tech enthusiasts, they really hadn't caught on with the normies yet.
 

My group of friends would futz around with computers quite a bit back in the late 90s. I still mostly keep in touch with all of them to varying degrees. One joined the military, was honorably discharged due to an injury, and now drives a long-haul truck. Another started as a low-paid IT support jockey and never really settled into anything you could call a career. The friend I keep in closest contact with, works a senior support position with a software company (not one of the major industry players, though) and makes somewhere around $100k/yr. Granted, that's a decent-ish living, but that kind of money doesn't go as far these days as it used to. I went into HVAC, which everybody and their brother seems to be doing in Florida, so there's a huge race to the bottom in this trade.

Success is a fuckin' crapshoot when you don't have wealthy parents.

Making games isn't actually that easy? I've been doing it for 25 years, and making a game that's good that people enjoy requires, in no small part, that you yourself enjoy playing games, and that you understand what fun is.

That's a good insight - we're essentially talking about art. There's no real indication that AI can do the actually creative part. But I wonder if a union can either? Art is about allowing inspiration to hit somebody like lightning and allow it to rise to the top. Unions are about making rules for everything to enforce fairness, and I wonder if that will be the most creative environment. Of course top-down corporations struggle with it too especially as they get bigger.

We probably would do well to shake the conception that Intelligence agencies are all-seeing/all-knowing fountains of competence. In reality they are filled with paranoid people of various levels of competence with a whole range of dispositions, including occasionally criminal.Intelligence agencies need to be a little criminal at times to get the job done. The idea that one of them might have been doing shady shit, in an agency that specializes in shady shit shouldn't surprise anyone. Hell, it was probably why they hired him.

FWIW, the first machine to scan a spectrogram and turn in back into sound was "pattern playback", created about a decade before Oram's synthesizer.

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

You are heading down the right path.

A book that made things more clear for me is "Non uniform random variate generation" by Luc Devroye (https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~mascagni/Devroye.pdf).

The generation of different distributions can be done algorithmically, but the algorithms get to the core of the processes making the noise. E.G. 1/f noise can be made from summing many exponential decaying functions. Electrons falling in holes in silicon - same thing. So we have 1/f noise in silicon. The type of process determines the type of noise whether quantum electron events or rain or insects chirping.

While noise does emerge from quantum things, it also can emerge from higher level processes.

Sure, although the Fourier transform itself dates back to 1822.

Of course all you need to create a spectrogram is a filterbank - a bunch of analog filters, and all you need to invert it is to add the frequency amplitudes back together.

This is all a bit irrelevant though since what Oram built was actually an analog musical synthesizer controlled by hand drawn (then optically scanned) film strips. No spectrogram involved at all. Similar analog scanning tech COULD have been used to scan a spectrogram and control addition of the corresponding frequencies, but this wasn't what she built.

https://www.daphneoram.org/ora...

Claims of perfect randomness from quantum physicists are always wrong.

1) The claims rely on some detector being 50/50 (they never are), always detecting individual events (they often see multiple or none) .
2) Randomness amplification is a subfield of entropy extraction and it cannot give you full entropy (aka perfect randomness).

cURL and libcurl, solid tools that recently withstood AI-driven exploit research, are written in C. Rust is not a cure-all for every problem.

We're talking porn. That already requires having somewhat selective moral standards to run a business in that industry. It made sense to oppose age verification when there was the potential to lose business, but the calculus changed once it became clear that this is just the new regulatory framework they have to operate under. Otherwise, compliant competitors will take the market share that Pornhub willingly relinquished.

Do you not understand how the US legal system works? It went to the SCOTUS. That's it, end of the line - it's not getting overturned. Plus, if it wasn't obvious, no politician wants to campaign on "let's let kids access porn" (which is exactly how their opponent would frame it), so there's a snowball's chance in hell that the democratic process itself would ever undo these age gate laws. Most people agree that kids shouldn't have access to adult material, so these laws have broad bipartisan support, even if the actual implementation is flawed as fuck.

Honestly, its almost a good thing.

A friend recently asked me to look into their kids laptop who had gotten around some age restriction stuff, and I was mystified. I asked the kid how they did it, and they laid out all the registry keys and the line of reasoning they followed to find them, and all I could think was this 10yo kid was as good a security professional as I am (he's not, but well, it was absolutely impressive work. ). I see this as a positive. The world of computers I grew in involved 10yos teaching themselves assembly to make C64 and Amstrad (I'm australian, so we got the same computers the UK folks did. BBCs, Sinclairs, and eventually C64s and Amstrads. Tandys where esoteric american imports) games. We started with basic, supplemented it with assembly we learned from library books and magazines (no internet in the 1980s!) and taught each other at school, then when we got to highschool and the fancy new IBMs we then learned Turbo pascal and got hooked on the possibilities. 40 years later I'm still at it.

But kids now, its internet slop, fortnight, and computers that dont require you to learn to LOAD "*",8,1 and tempt you with a manual promising infinite games if you learn to code.

But kids are resourceful, and if hacking their way around idiot-boomer designed age locks force them to actually learn how their computers work, then great.

I told my friend to download for their kid a copy of the Godot game engine, and look up the GDQuest lessons, because clearly this kids got a future, if he can be inspired to chase it.

Also, fuck AI, let kids learn.

Pornhub's access blocking made sense when there was still some possibility that the laws would be overturned. That ship basically sailed when the SCOTUS determined that Texas's age gate laws are constitutional. I'm really not sure what Pornhub's expected endgame is to their bury our head in the sand and hope it's all just a bad dream strategy.

Most of the devices kids use these days have locked bootloaders. You're not installing Linux on a current gen iPhone or iPad, and Samsung locks their stuff down too.

If some kid really wants to fap to porn on his desktop rig that he installed Linux on, that's something only the clutchiest of pearl clutchers is worrying about.

Texas and Florida aren't blue states.