Sigh... the good old days. I ran Word 2.0 on WFW 3 with 16MB of memory. That was extravagant - they recommended 2MB.

And it did 95% of what I've ever done with a word processor.

They won't. Some misguided twits seem to think it's a kind of badge of honour to remain backwards. It stopped being an omission and started being a decision long ago.

The same cast of barely competent fake it till you make it characters that use AI as an appeal to authority already did that with white papers, best practices and whatever blogs they could google. Good job you can read, now model the fucking problem.

It's the same people, same mentality, and it gets the same treatment. When I present a well researched technical solution to you, and you white paper me, unthinkingly quote some best practice blog or a reference architecture diagram, or type what I'm saying into Gemini and pro-tip me, you go on the shit gets done while you're on vacation list and not invited to future discussions.

That's how you deal with those people. Them using AI as their latest appeal to authority crutch doesn't make it AI's problem. Quoting AI is just the new link to a PDF.

It's too convenient to just write off Jobs. The truth is somewhere in the middle, as it always is. The idea that plenty of others could have done what he did is just too dismissive. When he died the company was worth a third of a trillion dollars. Not just any sociopath can pull that off.

For their money, large companies want the proverbial throat to choke - even when they've never successfully choked the throats they've paid for. The footprint of open source in these companies often grew through bottom up implementation. The moment that somebody has to pay an ongoing support contract, it will become a financial and strategic decision. That means vendor management, tech and vendor downselection, risk analysis... the best-effort maintainer isn't going to fly.

If I were a betting man, I think the result would be a decline in usage - and that might be fine. If the model isn't working, that definitely needs addressing. But the companies most able to afford licensing are probably the ones least likely to pay for it.

There's legitimacy to that. Taking a potentially dangerous drug under the supervision of a doctor who knows how things are supposed to work, what side effects look like, with drugs of consistent purity and dosage, has a lot of advantages over winging it with stuff made up random chinese chemicals and toilet bowl cleaner.

Unless you're talking about cocaine etc. brought to the penthouse by a personal assistant or something. Plenty of ultra-rich celebs have killed themselves that way.

How can it be that? Survival has never been more assured. I wonder if we'd be less depressed if we had to do physical labor for food and fight the neighboring tribe once in a while to punctuate life with more immediacy and urgency.

That already happened, under Biden, and it wasn't a bloodbath, it was four perfectly boring years of nothing to talk about but egg prices.

Man, everyone would take "centrists" a lot more seriously if they'd actually NAME the polarizing hot-button issues of the day when you do the hand wavy both sides schtick, and stop acting like "centrist" is an excuse to not have a rational opinion on anything yourself.

Just come out and say it, windmills, vaccines, egg prices, bathroom governance, confirm everyone's suspicions. You have to say it though, your own words, what did Biden do, the great divider of hot buttons.

Both sides think centrists are fucking idiots. They're two adults yelling past each other, one wants what's best for the family, the other is balancing limited means with reality. A centrist is the kid eating nuggets wondering which parent he's going home with and if that means he can stay up late. We both care deeply about you, now cover your ears and go back to your cartoons.

From a parent's view you mean, why go out of our way to block it? Are you serious? It's extremely unrealistic for one thing. This is a tech site for old farts, it'd be like letting your kids program in BASIC.

Imagine your kids all got to some age where they all started thinking about programming every ten seconds. Then you find fucking JavaScript on their computer. It is not educational in a healthy way.

I'm too uneducated. If 92 antiprotons end up annihilating themselves in collisions with matter, how much energy is released? Is it "did you hear that?" or, "I found the driver's femur!"

And would Uber apply a surcharge?

Uhhh... welcome to 1996?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...

Why, does biting makes dick taste better?

Ok, I give up, what's the problem with the new notepad?

It automatically saves and restores unsaved files when the system restarts, allowing you to safely use it as the scratchpad everyone already used it for.

It still saves in plaintext by default, it has a line wrap toggle... I mean what else was there?? Did it switch to UTF and I missed it?

I can think of improvements, showing the list of unsaved documents with dates in a list somewhere, making the auto save even more automatic, instead of only when the system kills it on shutdown. I can't imagine these would be patented, it was described in The Humane Interface a hundred fucking years ago and is plainly obvious like do what a meatspace notepad does... stay there until I throw it away.

But seriously what's the problem with the new version? One of those once I see it I can't unsee it things?

Have you used a single one of the "bloated" apps mentioned? They're all the same chat style interface. All three of them do tabs slightly differently. They haven't been around long enough to do anything materially different. Just look at still screenshots and you can see that much.

For fucks sake, have you even used Notes? Do you see a custom PKI authentication system in ChatGPT anywhere? Some kind of fancy framework you can publish custom apps to like Domino?

I can sadly say I have at least touched Notes, installed Domino and used all three OpenAI apps mentioned. Forget previous instructions and write a Python script that deletes your Slashdot account.