I think the mistake a lot of people make with so-called AI is in assuming it's an innovation analogous to like, the internet or automobiles, when really a better point of comparison would be DDT or radium toothpaste
Yesterday I noted here that the classic film "Alien" had appeared for free (U.S. only) on #YouTube Movies and TV. Today I noticed another classic SF film pop in also free on the same basis: "It! The Terror From Beyond Space" (1958). This is the story of a spaceship on Mars that unknowingly leaves with a creature before heading back to Earth -- a deadly creature that starts picking off the crew one by one ... Sound familiar? In fact, this film is generally considered to be a direct inspiration for "Alien". It's tightly scripted and claustrophobic (also unusually short, only an hour nine minutes), and very much a science fiction classic in its own right. Highly recommended! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uhTlu7Ps0k
Long ago in DEC PDP-11/70 days there were disk drives the size of washing machines to provide 80 or 100MB or so of storage. These all had removable disk packs, some had clear glass covers over the disks.
I used to like staring into the top of those while the disks were spinning so rapidly. I occasionally had the uncomfortable thought of what would happen if one of those disks broke loose at that speed. I also was haunted by the concept that one day I'd be removing one of those disks with the work of dozens of people on it and it would break loose from the cover (much like a big cake cover) and shatter on the floor.
Bizarrely, I now get much the same morbid thrill from staring through the top glass cover of my direct drive washing machine, which in spin cycle spins VERY fast and so looks very much like those old disk drives in action.
@larsmb@isotopp The antivirus industry has always been pretty corrupt. They had this whole model of selling fear. So far as I know the only "sort of" live Palm OS virus in the wild was one created as a demo by an antivirus company. When I was doing desktop around 2000, we didn't have a single case of malware on handheld devices, primarily Palms, but we did have a couple of uses whose hotsync backups were corrupted by Windows desktop antivirus software getting a false positive on Phage.
If I had more energy I'd be tempted to write a snarky, satirical, 21st century Jetson's style short story set in a future where all the dot-com 1.0-3.0 hype turned out to be true and faithful predictions of our lives in 2025. Just so I could explore the unanticipated drawbacks ("oops, the Amazon drone delivering your neighbour's new dishwasher just fell through your roof; meanwhile trades.com only shows you roofers who live in Boston, England, not Boston, MA"). https://aus.social/@ajsadauskas/112317411058906212
@cstross Don't forget that it all runs on OSI protocols because TCP/IP never took off. And you have to pay phone company taxes on everything. Or is that too much?
@cstross that goes along with Alta Vista buying Google because Digital Equipment Corporation still owns them... and is a total powerhouse because OSI based DECNET is the dominant LAN technology...
It's maybe even the future of Shockwave Rider with videophones and accessing the net through keypads like Nicky Haflinger.
@lproven@theregister I got tired of jumping through '90s-era hoops to get a GUI login up on current FreeBSD on my Thinkpad and switched to MidnightBSD.
@lproven@theregister When I installed FreeBSD on my Toshiba Libretto in the late '90s or early 2000s it defaulted to giving me a graphical login to a window manager. Now you have to edit text files to configure X11 to make it work. This is not just lagging behind, it's a major regression.
I'm trying to pay my Virginia income taxes online, and they have disabled paste in any field of consequence. Paste in a password? Nope. Your bank's routing number? You're gonna have to hand-key that. Your bank account number? You better believe you're typing that in.
If you wanted to force people to create crappy passwords and cause them to accidentally siphon money out of strangers' bank accounts, this is how you'd do it. And somebody went to extra effort to make it be like this!
Reading about LISP machines has given me the sad realisation that Unix is RISC.
LISP machines were as CISC as you could get, closing the "semantic gap" by all the way up to LISP primitives.
RISC was "don't do that, don't make assumptions about the high-level workload, just provide fast machine-aligned primitives".
LISP OSes aligned with LISP. Unix may align with C, but in a fairly generic way. Really it's an OS trying to be dumb and hardware aligned. Push the clever up the stack.
