I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.

I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.

But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.

Only if you upgrade to goldtooth.

So every kid needs to have a brokerage account now?

No, each kid needs to get an X ("The Everything App") account.

Normally, you don't license media (whether it's digital or analog is irrelevant). That CD or tape or vinyl record is sold, such that you own that copy. Title is transferred just exactly the same as how title is transferred when you buy (not license) a loaf of bread, or a screwdriver, or a book. (WARNING: Though I say "normally," what's normal does change. I'm aware that a lot of people use proprietary streaming to consume media now, instead of playing locally-stored purchased copies, and those people likely did agree to a licensing contract rather than purchasing anything.)

But with software, they've been claiming that a piece of paper that they inserted into the box, retroactively causes the sale to not have really happened, even though the information that the sale was a fraud, is hidden inside the box until after the fraud has been perpetrated. The customer thinks they bought the box rather than licensed it.

There was some monumental decision reinforcing this a while back. I'm not sure this is the best example, but it's well-illustrated in this decision in favor of Blizzard against a cheatbot named Glide, where the judge supports the outrageous assertion that WoW purchasers actually did not purchase what they thought they purchased. And then instead of throwing Blizzard's executives into prison for a decade to deter future fraud, he found in their favor instead. Dirty judge. He actually fucking says this:

section 3 of the EULA provides that Blizzard explicitly retains title to “all copies” of the game client software

[emphasis mine]

For whatever reason, nobody's tried that outside of software (that I know of). I still haven't seen a EULA packed in a loaf of bread or a music CD case. But maybe some day....?

You wouldn't necessarily be wrong to expect this form of fraud to happen some day, so perhaps you're right that Congress should nip it in the bud ASAP. Sure, ok. But Congress is normally reactive so it also makes sense they're seeing it just as software problem. None of their constituents are complaining about media companies defrauding them, just software companies.

Also UBI programs get you just enough to survive. Not to have an interesting life with projects, hobbies, etc... In other words, shut the fuck up or we are gonna starve you.

Well, if the US was a functioning country (or its predecessor), they would have hanged the crew of the White Lion in 1619 and freed its cargo of prisoners meant to be sold as slaves. It boggles the mind that this wasn't obvious, even at the time.

More people should spend more time trying to enjoy their own lives instead of obsessing over what other people are doing

I mistook your sig for a final paragraph in your post, and did a double-take!

Reading other people's code is a big part of how I learned to do things. I enjoyed Abacus' "Anatomy of the Commodore 64" for it's commented disassembly of the C64 ROMs. But it was easy for that to make sense, because it had been written in assembly language.

But once you're looking at to binaries compiled from higher-level languages, it gets more complicated to .. uh .. recreate the original intent.

Now they got computers to do that? Fuck yeah!

But this is a count-in too. He even wrote the first line of the song for you.

Shitstorm because of AI
The computer is making me cry
Hallucination's a bitch
But they say it'll make me rich
[first guitar solo]

Oh shit, this reminds me I have written a lot of 32-bit software that will rollover in 2038. Fortunately I retire the year before that...

You sure it's a Windows problem and not a mouse+bluetooth problem ? I had one that I hated because it forgot to click or move sometimes (particularly tiny motions). USB mouse or bust for me.

Yes. I never left X11 because my tries with Wayland showed that remote desktop via ssh+vnc didn't work and I need that daily. Maybe it works now or there is some suitable replacement but I never bothered as I don't see what problem Wayland is trying to solve and I don't need a faster screen.

D'oh. Mod me down; I deserve it for my fuckup.

the game's uncommon method of generating galaxies of incomprehensible scale on device consistently for all players from a single-seed happening on a phone is remarkable for those of us who remember phones performing far behind consoles or desktop PCs.

No it isn't. Your phone is a supercomputer by 1980s standards, and seeded generation (whether from a PRNG or hashing coordinates or whatever) goes back to at least then (and probably '60s/'70s). I'm not slamming the game, and seeded generation is often a good idea, but the idea that you can do it on handheld supercomputers is not remarkable, even the tiniest little bit.

You wanna see something super-fucking-impressive on an iPhone? Go back to the very first model and behold that it runs a truly-remarkably decent web browser. That was way more futuristic than this.

To this day I still haven't managed to improve my coding with AI.
When trying to do something I know nothing about, it just gives me standard boilerplate examples, but I could find them by myself just reading the doc.
When learning very obscure or uncommon protocols, it is no better than me.
When dealing with a large codebase (big makefile or cmake), you can't upload the whole thing to chatgpt, so how do you tell it to refactor something ? Maybe I'm showing my age but I don't get it. Maybe it works with the kernel because the entire code is publicly available, but for a private codebase ?

Yeah, well, about that... I just bought an oldish electric car, so my first thought was to go update the firmware(s). On the manufacturer's website it just says 'no longer supported' and doesn't even tell me what the last version numbers were. Damn lazy fucks.