some end in .com but oh god yes I HATE the term app.

I used the hell out of MS Works. It did what I needed quickly and without the HUGE bloat of M$Office and Word. Though I came from a GML background so it was easy...

LMAO...I wish I had mod points...you deserve it.

Yeah, and even native stuff is super bloated now.

I noticed an instance of Brave with all of the features turned off sitting at a new tab page was using 230MB.

I remember doing OK with a version of Firefox that supported xhtml and JavaScript 2 that ran on a machine with 16MB of RAM total.

And the current browsing experience isn't somehow instantaneous on a CPU with 16x the cores running at 10x the clock. The user response time is about the same.

I think that browser itself ran in 4-8MB. Probably with the Flash plugin loaded too.

FWIW that old machine would take about 15 minutes to encode a 3 minute mp3 file and my current machines does it in about six seconds. So the hardware gains are real.

Maybe ML will actually be able to find some optimizations that are too cumbersome for humans to manage.

Sorry but it's 2026 and this just means embarrassed conservative.

True.

Biden constantly reached out to conservatives

Because Biden could out-conservative any five Republicans combined.

He appointed a very moderate AG

"Moderate" also just means "embarrassed conservative."

even with the very obviously illegal Mar-A-Lago documents

Bzzt! Sitting presidents have total declassification powers. Trump could take and unilaterally declassify anything he wanted, period. And Trump did work with the Feds to secure them in a locked room in a residence with around the clock secret service protection. Now do VP Biden storing classified documents all over unsecured places, and Hillary with her illegal email server. Which she set up just two years after savaging the Bush Administration for using private email.

Interesting. Mythologized an eon later, "Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat, the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay.

—Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (c.1800 BCE)"

Those address the first application of spoken language to writing. Just to confuse matters a bit more, "The first writing can be dated back to the Neolithic era, with clay tablets being used to keep track of livestock and commodities." (per the wiki. I'll have to look more into this, I don't know if I've seen anything about it.) I have read that Egyptian hieroglyphics were originated for accounting. (Allegedly for beer, but I read about this in a "history of beer" article, so YMMV.)

I wish we had Feynman's insights around now. Besides the science of the small, here's what he had to say in '04 about what we have come to call AI today:

"Everybody who has analyzed the logical theory of computers has come to
the conclusion that the possibilities of computers are very interesting---if they could be made to be more
complicated by several orders of magnitude. If they had millions of times as many elements, they could make
judgments. They would have time to calculate what is the best way to make the calculation that they are about
to make. They could select the method of analysis which, from their experience, is better than the one that we
would give to them. And in many other ways, they would have new qualitative features"

My personal take after reading The Idea Factory (really good book btw) was that it was actually a combo of a monopoly with close government accountability that produced some remarkable results.

Basically, Bell had a monopoly, and in anti-trust hearings ~early 1900's it was argued that it was necessarily a monopoly from a technical perspective in order to have standardization of communication across the country. Congress reluctantly agreed, and granted Bell the ability to maintain the monopoly under the constraint that they must continually show that continuing it served the public interest.

Bell Labs was a big part of that - funneling profit into Bell Labs, and providing research and development that helped create the entire information age absolutely served the public interest (development of the transistor and cellular networks being two of the largest innovations coming out of that institution).

My personal take is that what we really saw was an unusually effective success story of checks and balances. Bell had strict accountability and a burden to prove that their existence served the public interest, and the courts and congress served as a check on business practices that would have really abused that monopoly. At the same time, you didn't have the situation we have with NASA, where congress is actually trying to impose rocket designs on NASA - that's very different, where instead of congress serving as accountability, congress is trying to drive pork into their districts. We should be striving for the Bell Labs model in more places IMO - business is allowed to do what business does best and works to maximize profit, and then government acts as accountability to make sure the profit motive isn't driving abusive behavior and the organization still serves the public interest. Big, powerful institutions in business and government should be set up to provide accountability to each other.

You people have gone insane.

Stop trying to control every atom of existence and every move people make.

You're sick in the head, not visionaries, not thought leaders.

Go plant a garden and get back in touch with the real world.

No, NOT FARMVILLE!

> genuine question - why was this code pushed now

Zuckerberg has aggressively been bribing politicians to enact this at the State level.

Several news stories about it though you have to search for terms like 'lobbying' and 'Meta' as fig leaves.

>arguing it unfairly advantages startups

Way to say your dealers suck.

Zeek teh Cockroach: "Must have something to do with those disgusting Scarabs."

The gift that keeps on giving. I was idly wondering why we have Bronze age, Iron age, etc., but no Clay age, then realized every age is a Clay age.

Thought a little more and wondered when pottery was first created, and found China was doing it around 18000BC, and we've been labeling the different potteries over time and space. So in a way we do have different "Clay Ages", but it's delineated in the descriptions of the technology and styles of the main product of the clay used by different civilizations.

Probably humanoid robots, it's already happening in China:

https://jingdaily.com/posts/ch...