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?

We've heard this soooo many times. Remember VB6? And all the new wonder languages since? How many even still exist?

If we actually had an AI that could do this, I'd be more worried about whether it needed us

Between this and COVID, Australia seems to have gone full Nazi.

I always wanted to visit both Oz and Hong Kong. Looks like I waited too long for both.

Seems like a reasonable move, but will he bring along the lousy engineering, shoddy construction, etc, that BMW gas cars are known for? Are their electric cars better, or do they fall apart in your driveway too?

  I can't get excited about anything connected to BMW. I've never even ridden in an electric, but I recently junked an X5 (the last BMW I will ever touch!) because it wasn't worth fixing anymore and I couldn't bring myself to just pass the curse on to a new victim. Is Apple interested in anything besides the insignia and an excuse for a high price?

Good idea I hadn't thought of. Apple didn't used to need a lot of sales and support types

> At Apple, half of their employees don't have college degrees," reports NBC News.

Back when I would have loved to work at Apple, it took a master's to get in the door as a developer. Lobotomized computers and ever higher prices allow for easier staffing.

College degrees used to have a place, but they're mostly a scam nowadays when "universities" are glorified tech schools and proud of it. Originally it took effort and ability to get into college, and a college education included learning to think, learning about the culture, learning some social skills. Now anyone can get into college, the selection is financial and the results, in many cases, aren't worth it.

Brave New World and 1984 both involved fanciful technology when written: 1984 had the telescreen (which is surpassed easily by a tablet attached to the wall) and Brave New World had all babies grown in bottles (sounds like it could be coming soon.)

In both cases the technologies were used to control populations. And where would we find a government that would go to such lengths to manage its subjects...?