There was that moment it time when he was the underdog doing cool stuff. It seemed like he couldn’t screw up, because his companies were hitting the ball out of the park one after the other.
Then the pedo guy debacle taught us who he really is.
I see this often. That tells me I’ve done enough scrolling and it’s time to get back to work.
I usually browse /all and top 6 hours
A cool feature for the fediverse could be some kind of aggregated view and a way for the community to link common topic threads.
An exceptionally well trained AI customer service has the potential to be amazing.
I only call or try to chat/email with customer service if something has gone way wrong - like outside the typical customer service capability of assistance.
If an AI can realize that my problem is human worthy and escalate it faster, that would save me time in the chat queue talking with someone who barely knows my native language.
Alas, AIs will be poorly trained, so the bad-english CS reps will still be right behind the AI interface waiting for me.
The amount of time I reset it myself and the problem went away is too damn high.
Usually the end user kinda smirks and says huh, weird, I tried that! You must be magic!
Me too, thought I was the only one
EarlyOOM is your friend. Tweak it to save the most important stuff and kill irrelevant stuff first when low on memory.
Driver support was so dicey. If you had anything even remotely not mainstream, you would be compiling your own video driver, or network driver, or basically left to figure it out for any other peripheral. So many devices like scanners and very early webcams just claimed zero Linux support at all, but you could at times find someone else’s project that might work.
I tried to switch to Linux as a desktop system several times in the late 90s but kept going back to windows because hardware support just wasn’t there yet.
Wouldn’t be surprised if there was an exceptionally well funded US startup that makes a debut before TikTok is blocked if they don’t sell. TikTok has to weigh the possibility that they can’t compete if they don’t exist.
Now, 100% of books and all media is simplified and accessible to anybody who can get access to this tool
All right all right, I get why this is kind of funny and perhaps it’s potentially a bad sign for humanity.
But consider an adult who’s learning the English language and is still at a basic level. If they want reading practice, they are often stuck with kids books. This would make practice a lot more interesting.
When I was young I remember that banks often had large drive-thrus with pneumatic tube systems at each car stall.
There would only be one teller but they could serve quite a few lanes.
If you wanted a cash withdrawal, you might put your ID and your withdrawal slip in the tube, and a few minutes later it would come back with cash in it.
It was pretty rad. But ATMs seem like a better bet overall.
There’s a pretty good chance that every employee facing this offer is in a position where Dell sees them as replaceable. They want people who follow orders and not much more, so if you want to look at it through that filter Dell got what they wanted.
Unless somebody over there at the top is crazy, Dell would have had individual deals with the true innovators, decision makers, movers and shakers internally who are viewed as top tier and irreplaceable.
There must be bots trolling GitHub for API keys, crypto secret keys, and other such valuable data
One of the best things ever about LLMs is how you can give them absolute bullshit textual garbage and they can parse it with a huge level of accuracy.
Some random chunks of html tables, output a csv and convert those values from imperial to metric.
Fragments of a python script and ask it to finish the function and create a readme to explain the purpose of the function. And while it’s at it recreate the missing functions.
Copy paste of a multilingual website with tons of formatting and spelling errors. Ask it to fix it. Boom done.
Of course, the problem here is that developers can no longer clean their inputs as well and are encouraged to send that crappy input straight along to the LLM for processing.
There’s definitely going to be a whole new wave of injection style attacks where people figure out how to reverse engineer AI company magic.
The strategy makes a lot of business sense too. It’s why piracy controls in Microsoft Windows were so weak for so long.
Steve Ballmer said something along the lines of if the Chinese are going to pirate software, I want it to be Microsoft software.
I’m not sure if this game has an online mode but generally speaking the network effect of online means more people playing equals a better online experience. If half those people didn’t pay, the ones who did pay still get a better online experience right?
Impressive, I don’t think I’d heard of Ceefax. It seems like it was broadcast and then recorded, and then this set top box knew how to interpret and parse the data into this format.
I ran a single line BBS system in the Seattle area in my early teens which was early '90s. At the peak we were averaging about 20 calls a day and I kept the whole thing running for a few years. I had a four drive CD-ROM tower system loaded up with shareware CD archives and a connection to fidonet, so you could exchange email with anyone else who had a fidonet address around the world. It was freaking cool and the skills I learned building that prepared me to jump into IT during the .com boom which was a pretty lucky career break for a teen in Seattle.
That era was the tail end of the golden days of BBS systems because Prodigy and CompuServe followed quickly and what they had was professional content creators and some of the first integrations for buying airline tickets, stocks, reading the news, and functional email that reached a wider audience. At that time, you have to remember there was no other way to access those services in real time. Your only other source for this would have been TV or newspapers, or picking up the phone and calling a travel agent.
A lot of these services’ business model was selling hours of access. So you might pay 30 bucks a month for 50 hours, and if you stayed online longer you’d pay more. Those numbers were fine because after you finished whatever you wanted to do, there was nothing left to look at so it was easy to log back off. Very few people were leaving anything resembling an instant messenger logged in all the time.
Those services were constantly updating so every time you logged in you’d see new games, photo libraries, user-generated content in their forums. But in the end they were essentially overgrown BBS’s with funding.
All of them, including AOL, tried to stay relevant by adding the internet as soon as it became a little more mainstream to talk about. But within a fairly short period of time, maybe about a year, the content available on the wider internet from major sources outpaced whatever Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL could produce on their own, so most people logged in just to bypass and get to the internet.
The next generation of getting online after that was subscribing directly to a local ISP for a dial-up account.
As I think back to this, we knew the future was coming fast, but nobody seemed to really understand what that would entail. Absolutely nobody was envisioning services to come like cloud storage, social media, non-stop connectivity from your pocket etc. That was basically sci-fi movie stuff. Connectivity was simply too slow, and we didn’t even have high-res pics or videos stored on our computers at the time. Photos were still taken on film, and video was stored on magnetic tape. It was still very analog and very few people could afford the hardware to digitize it. Early scanners were crappy, only black and white, and expensive.
The most incredible services to launch at the beginning were the chat systems and forums, and online shopping. Clicking on a picture of a cool thing, Entering a credit card number, and it showing up at your door a few days later was pretty cool, and I can distinctively remember the first Christmas where I did all of my shopping online and then bragged about not having to go to the mall. A pretty glorious experience for somebody who never really liked the mall.
Mail order systems existed but you had to call to place your order on the phone (during business hours), or physically mail your order slip with a handwritten credit card number or a check.
I think one of the most fascinating components of this that struck people was how fast you could communicate with people on the other side of the earth. A lot of people would exclaim “I just talked to a guy in Australia!” as the most eye-opening first experience. That’s a real tell on how isolated we used to be.
In the early '90s, there was a very real sense that most people around you had not ever been online before. So if you started talking about your experiences most people would look at you like you’re an alien, or at least some kind of super nerd. There was a period of time where it was decidedly uncool.
My best friend to this day is a guy I met in middle school and we quickly discovered that we both knew about BBS systems. By the time I graduated there were maybe only four or five guys in our BBS group of friends at our high school of 600 people.
Anyways, sorry for the essay. Having been born into the analog era and grown up as it became digital was a wild experience that those before and those after might not totally relate to.
I think we’ll improve this a lot. Now it’s a race to be first, later it will be a race to be profitable and keep costs low.
Plus the sun outputs a lot more energy than earth can ever consume so we just need to get better at collecting it without creating waste on the side.
Thanka for this comment, I wasn’t aware there are so many other options