We've had 5G, but I leave it disabled because it doesn't do anything useful except drain my battery faster. I don't see that changing: I do the same thing to any AI features that allow it. 6G is probably even more irrelevant.

If I was obsessed with watching movies on a tiny screen with bad controls, maybe.

Or they identify with the bad guys. Cooler by definition

"It's going to change how we think about our smartphones."

Yeah, they're not completely the enemy yet.

The AI bubble is wrecking the US tech industry (among other things, like the economy), and the best hope of remaining in business is to trash the rest of the world as well. As a side benefit, loot the rest of the world by selling them AI server farms.

I had a 2008 BMW X5 that I wound up junking. Instead of a monthly payment to use what I thought I bought, I'd want:
- A cooling system whose mostly-plastic parts don't crumble and fall apart;
- A PCV valve that doesn't leave you by the road and cost $1600 to replace (at a third party shop!);
- A negative battery cable that doesn't cost $300 to replace if you look at it wrong;
- An ECM that I can replace for $300 (10 minutes) rather than having to pay the dealer $2300 to program it to recognize the transmission;
- Door handles that don't break and are a hassle to replace due to sheer bad design.

You get the picture. Of course, I'd be even happier to pay half as much for a car that is reliable enough to safely go out of town in cold weather. Turned out to be easy!

Lousy engineering plus shoddy construction in a great synthesis of expensive unreliability. It's amazing how many BMW owners never seem to learn, and get screwed over and over again.

I remember having to phone a stock broker, who would eventually enter the order on his terminal. Then we got direct online trading, much faster (and cheaper.)
Meanwhile, big companies computer trade on a millisecond scale, with no humans involved (and probably pay less per trade than I do, and probably get around inconveniences like the delay for their nanosecond autotrades to settle.)

Anyone who makes money in the stock market is skimming it from someone else. I understand that, but why hand money to others with a huge advantage? At least casinos have a regulated and known house edge.

We need universal minimum latency for trades, or individuals need to hold equity and stop giving the robber barons money for nothing.

The AI scam can't go on much longer. LLMs have legitimate uses and possibilities, but nothing to justify the hype.

So... what if Someone is pushing all the AI hysteria for other reasons. They plan to:
  1. Completely tank the economy and blame the tech sector;
  2. Get lots of nuclear power plants running again;
  3. (Hopefully not) use the growing horde of destitute
            tech workers to kick off a communist revolution.

Apple used to be famous for bringing out new libraries to "revolutionize" computing, hounding developers to become dependent, then dumping them after a few years when they didn't get mentioned enough in the press. Lots of us from the Classic era got burned by embracing the uber-hyped QuickDraw3D or OpenDoc, for example.

Now Apple seems to be keeping (mostly crappy, the last 15 years) software around, and abandoning hardware that doesn't make them immediately rich. Progress?

I got into Macs around 1985 and refused to work on anything else through the early 2000's, when things got so bad that it stopped being fun or practical. I got rid of all Apple gear, spent 20 years working on Windows, and mostly enjoyed it.

Most of my phone failures have at least included the charging port getting loose, requiring wiggling, rubber bands, etc to charge unattended. Of my 3 phones that unrecoverably black screened, 2 were having this problem before they died.

I very rarely use a USB cable for data. Getting it to work is too iffy, I can mail to myself faster in most cases. Part of this may have been my Pixel 6, that shipped with one of those !@#$% charge-only cables that should be banned in the civilized world.

I will never again buy a phone without wireless charging. It's slower (not a problem overnight) and wastes a tiny amount of power, but so far it always works.

CR is as famous for suggesting good things for bad reasons, as for their ludicrously clueless "reviews".

I am certainly not agreeing with MS, but asking them to "continue providing support for Windows 10 computers for free until more people have upgraded to Windows 11" is just delusional.

At least the "Welcome to Gemini!" and "Put Gemini on your Home Screen" spam seems to have slowed down for now.

IIRC, when the Power Macs first came out, there was a similar tool to convert 680x0 binaries to PowerPC. It wasn't cheap, and I don't know if it produced any sort of source code (except disassembly.) Again IIRC, the only program I know of that tried it was a word processor called WriteNow, which was originally written in 680x0 Assembly.

I can't improve on any of that. Of all the companies where I used Agile, not a single one did enough of it to give it a chance of working and were surprised when it didn't. The closest was a team at Microsoft where the Lead didn't know we were trying it informally.

When a process almost always fails and is always blamed by "experts" on not being executed perfectly, people should start to suspect something. Could it be that the easy way is actually too hard?

Agile, code patterns, "modern" C++, etc, all feel like they were invented to get tenure or kick start careers threatened by age or outsourcing, not actually improve anything. Dogbert would be proud.

Found it by accident, circa 1975. An old teletype with a phone cradle modem that could access the PDP-11 at a local college. Two or three people in the school knew how to run the dozen or so games it contained, and a guidance counselor kept a signup list. We could sign up for time during lunch, which I skipped regularly.

I found a book in the library about BASIC. I tried typing a program in to the system (without knowing if it spoke BASIC or could be programmed directly) and it worked! I wrote a quadratic equation solver !!!

The teletype went away, but a friend that I had initiated worked at a diner all summer (84 hours/week; $5/hour; no W-2) and bought a TRS-80. We were both in college in town, and spent several weekends reimplementing Super Star Trek on his (gasp) color monitor, the first either of us had ever seen.

If it would block updates to Windows 11, it might be worth buying an eSCL device and leaving it attached. Could we just get a dongle?