@ahfrom Useless trivia of the day: Tiny weaving spiders (the ones we call "lykkeedderkop" in Danish) have enormous brains for their size - their brains are star-shaped because a little bit of brain pokes out into the legs.
This is likely because there's a minimum absolute brain size to be able to spin a good web, and they have exactly that.
I'm idly waiting for the iPad Mini refresh that's probably not coming, the same way I was waiting for the iPod Touch refresh that never came and the iPod refresh that never came, as is my habit.
The iPad Mini, neglected black sheep of the lineup, is the purest and most honest expression of what an iPad is and what it's for: a small, incredibly portable computer for doing one thing at a time, where rough edges of computation are polished smooth and the interface falls away and disappears.
@mhoye I read a while ago that perhaps the reason retrocomputing has taken off so much in recent years is that it takes us back to a more innocent time, when we could all still imagine computing as personal empowerment rather than bleak people-farming, dehumanization and surveillance feudalism.
But perhaps what we should be thinking about is less retrocomputing and more retrofuturistic computing. What would a 2024 Oberon successor be like?
I'm having my gallbladder removed tomorrow. I've been told that the procedure itself is pretty much routine, but also that I can expect to be in quite a bit of pain the next days and that I'll probably need morphine.
So I've stocked up on comic books / "graphical novels"; that's probably around the level my brain will be able to handle.
@mcc There is no such incentive. There is a very, very strong incentive (namely, not wanting to empower the worst scumbags in tech) to not share your work publicly anymore.
This, to me, is the most harmful effect so far of generative AI.
@ColinTheMathmo The fastest-moving reptile in the world is a turtle. The leatherback sea turtle can swim at just over 35 km/h, just beating out the black iguana which sprints at 33 km/h.
@ColinTheMathmo More time passed between the building of the Egyptian pyramids and the reign of Cleopatra than has passed between the reign of Cleopatra and today.
(Speaking of Cleopatra, she spoke eight languages and was the first of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt who actually spoke Egyptian at all. The stories about her beauty are a modern invention; contemporaries mostly noted her wit and intellect, and described her as plain-looking if they even mentioned her physical appearance at all.)
I am thinking about making a Lisp-based fantasy console as my next hobby project, as a way to break me out of the creativity funk I've been in for a while. What would the home computers I grew up with have been like if they were made by Commodore-Symbolics?
(But I still feel that it's kinda pointless - we can't share anything we make online anymore, unless we want to contribute free labour to loathsome AI companies. The nice thing about a fantasy console is that it's economically worthless.)
If someone is starving and you're not, you don't get to criticize them for making poor food choices. Similarly, if you work in an organization that can afford to upgrade its systems regularly and hire people who understand security (who aren't cheap, even by tech standards), you don't get to snark about the lapses at the British Library that opened them up to a ransomware attack. 1/
@gvwilson Back in the 90s, just before Google appeared on the scene and ended the discussion on what web search engines could be like, there were serious discussions in Denmark about trying to build a public-funded and run search engine, which would be managed by the libraries. Librarians, people figured, had the expertise to deal with large-scale information management. (And they ran our first cybercafes, back when that was a thing.)
I think of the future we gave up on, and I could weep.
In order to write a web browser, we'll first need to write a programming language to write the web browser in.
We started writing a programming language for web browsers, but our programming language turned out to be so good at writing operating systems that now we're rewriting the Linux kernel in it, and that's taking up enough time we had to put the web browser on hold
Hold on is Rust just the grandest exercise in yak shaving ever committed
Streaming this SUNDAY at 3 PM EST (noon PST) with @christinelove and @spookysquid: After a four year haitus due to something weird that happened in the year 2020, the "Squidcast" is back!
We're going to be streaming "Heart of the Alien", the widely-forgotten Sega CD sequel to Out of This World/Another World, plus Flashback, a spiritual sequel by OOTW's publisher. (Picking up right where we left off in 2020.)
I will find a time next week to finish Toki Tori 2.
The most odd piece of very local retrogaming culture arcana from my part of the world: All the C64 kids here thought Mario Bros was a cheap rip-off of the clearly superior original, Giana Sisters.
(That misunderstanding lasted until Nintendos started seriously taking off here - and even then it took a while.)
@codinghorror Fun fact: In Norwegian, if you want to say something is crazy (in the sense of "chaotic" / "wild" / "out of control"), a common idiom is to say that it is completely Texas.
"In the degrowth literature, a caricature of the typical economist is presented as believing in unlimited economic growth, and that growth should be pursued regardless of its environmental impact. This is a straw man. It would be a naïve economist who did not recognise that constraints exist. And economists usually limit their projections to a few decades to come, rather than to the infinite future, in which they supposedly believe in unlimited exponential economic growth. Certainly, there are theoretical economic growth models which portray the possibility of exponential growth into the infinite future, but economists have had enough common sense not to assume stylised theoretical models are the be-all-and-end-all when it comes to public policy."
Then why, Mr. Tunny, is it so hard to find an economist who can tell us when the economy should stop growing?
Consider the internet: A smartphone is a much, much more power-efficient internet access device than a desktop computer. But the total consumption of billions of smartphones is worse than that of millions of desktop computers - access habits change, and more infrastructure is needed.
Steam engines followed a similar trajectory: The more efficient they got, the more were built.
Long before the current wave of #AIHype, we were being groomed for automation panics with misleading stories. Remember this one? "'Truck driver' is the most common job in America. Self-driving trucks are just around the corner. How can we prevent America's army of truckers from turning into a howling mob when the robots steal their jobs?"
@pluralistic I would argue that they have already turned AI into a Paperclip Maximizer.
Power-hungry and water-thirsty AI data centres are being built in a world that's in the middle of a climate crisis. Google is planning one in Uruguay, where potable water has been so scarce that salt water is being mixed in the tap water. And all that so we can generate corporate word salad and phishing scams at the touch of a button.
Boeing managers: "We don't sell planes, we're an airframe infrastructure provider. While we personally do not like badly designed parts and dangerous engineering just as you, we believe that providing a platform for all designs and engineering provides a level playing field in the marketplace of transportation."
As someone coming off a decade of working there, I can tell you with some confidence that “you should use Firefox despite Mozilla’s leadership” is far more true and has been true far longer than you realize.
But you should also understand that original market-share vs ceo salary meme is a creation of Brendan Eich, presumably born of a grudge, and notably elided his tenure as CTO, during which the worst of that decline happened.
@mhoye I've used Firefox since back when it was named Phoenix, and I'll continue to do so for as long as I can.
My own frustration with the Mozilla leadership is about specifically this: I want to keep using Firefox (and I don't want to use Chrome!), but they seem to keep making decisions that make me worry they're going to destroy it.
@cstross I've largely come to think that the defining difference between early millennials and being born on the arse-end of Generation X (like myself) is whether or not you got to experience enough of the last chapter of the Cold War to get your head at least slightly fucked up by it.
(Inasmuch as those generational cohorts make sense outside a very specific North American context at all.)