The problem is that Dems are just culturally irrelevant. Most people don't care about issues, policy or the economy, they just want to cheer for a team and will justify everything their team does regardless of efficacy or outcome. Trump is the fun underdog team that everyone is talking about, the Dems are the boring party-pooper team we all love to hate. During covid, that boring became a source of needed stability, but after boring stewarded us through the crisis, nobody wanted to be associated with them again.
For whatever reason, the UBOL creator chose not to include zapper/picker in order to make it as "lite" as possible. It wasn't a Manifest v3 thing, as they've explained.
I have no problem with using a separate extension for zapping.
This reminded me of Bishop's Castle in Colorado, USA — an incredible project built almost entirely by one man (who sadly died last year) working on it nonstop for 40 years:
It's approaching a very strange situation where people make overly wordy and bloated AI generated content and other people try to use AI to compress it back into useful pellets vaguely corresponding to the actual prompts used to generate the initial content. Which were the only bits anybody cared about in the first place.
One guy pays the AI to dig a hole, the other guy pays the AI to fill in the hole. Back and forth they go, raising the BNP but otherwise not accomplishing anything.
It's a completely free, both in message volume and queue size, highly available hosted 1-1 and 1-n topic based message queue with automatic sharding, excellent performance, and high-quality prebuilt libraries. It has built-in notification support to all platforms and a basic UI toolkit that is easy to use.
The fact that it's also a chat thing is honestly secondary to the foundational tech.
Those Japanese vending machines blow my mind. I got lost on takao mountain once and was utterly hopeless of ever finding civilization again. I found abandoned and rotting tractors the forest had taken back, weird half completed concrete structures, the trail was gone, I was well and truly lost. Then, I turn a corner, and find a goddamned vending machine. Powered. With stock.
I followed its power cord back for a solid ten minutes before I found the little building on a trail it led to.
Somebody restocked that vending machine. Somebody installed it.
It's like this throughout Japan. Boggles the mind.
Can? Anything that a mighty military, economic, and political power allows.
Should? Maybe walk their talk? Too many times the US is criticizing countries like China for doing something only to turn around and do the very same thing but sprinkled with a "feel-good" explanation.
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
The online community for bionicle has done a solid job of archiving and even polishing the various content that was released over the years. There's a site that collected all of the flash games [0], and someone stitched together a few versions of the "Biological Chronicle" [1], which is every book, comic, and even transcriptions of two of the flash games that had an actual narrative, woven so the narratives all line up.
[0] https://biomediaproject.com/bmp/
[1] I don't have a link handy to the ebook, I'm also not sure if they had permission to upload all of that content in one file or not
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
> It's almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows
This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.
I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.
Sometimes, the "well, if you really want this it will take N dev-years" approach got avoided things for a while, but just as often we were explicitly overruled. I fought passionately against things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart (was that Win10 or Win8? Either way user feedback was so strong that that got reverted in the very next update), the Edge title bar having no empty space on top so if your window hung off the right side and you opened too many tabs you could not move it, and so on. Others on my team fought battles against removing the Start button in Win8, trying to get section labels added to the Win8 Start Screen so it was obvious that you could scroll between them, and so on. In the end, the designers get what they want, the engineers who say "yes we can do that" get promoted, and those of us who argued most strongly for the users burnt out, retired, or left the team.
I probably still know a number of people on that team, I consider them friends and smart people, but after trying out Win11 in a VM I really have an urge to sit down with some of them and ask what the heck happened. For now, this is the first consumer Windows release since ME that I haven't switched to right at release, and until they give me back my side taskbar I'm not switching.
With the risk of linking to 4chan; there is a /g/ guide to how to navigate Windows and it recommends exactly this.[0]
However: I do not publicly endorse software piracy, and so do not recommend using this guide; legitimate LTSC licenses are only possible to come by for Businesses with a minimum spend of 5 licenses.[1] :(
Whenever I set up a new computer for older family members, despite it being windows 11, I always install open shell[1] and retro bar[2]. Between the two, I've made the operating system look very close to Windows XP visually, and they always appreciate it.
In 1949, Charlie Munger was 25 years old. He was hired at the law firm of Wright & Garrett for $3,300 per year, or $42,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars.
A few years later, in 1953, Charlie was 29 years old when he and his wife divorced. He had been married since he was 21. Charlie lost everything in the divorce, his wife keeping the family home in South Pasadena. Munger moved into “dreadful” conditions at the University Club and drove a terrible yellow Pontiac, which his children said had a horrible paint job. According to the biography written by Janet Lowe, Molly Munger asked her father, “Daddy, this car is just awful, a mess. Why do you drive it?” The broke Munger replied: “To discourage gold diggers.”
Shortly after the divorce, Charlie learned that his son, Teddy, had leukemia. In those days, there was no health insurance, you just paid everything out of pocket and the death rate was near 100% since there was nothing doctors could do. Rick Guerin, Charlie’s friend, said Munger would go into the hospital, hold his young son, and then walk the streets of Pasadena crying.
One year after the diagnosis, in 1955, Teddy Munger died. Charlie was 31 years old, divorced, broke, and burying his 9 year old son. Later in life, he faced a horrific operation that left him blind in one eye with pain so terrible that he eventually had his eye removed.
But by the time he was 69 years old, he had become one of the richest 400 people in the world, been married to his second wife for 35+ years, had eight children, and countless grandchildren.
Beyond investing and business, Charlie teaches us about resilience, dignity, and life well lived. Rest in peace to a legend.
The more complete quote from Brand is: “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away.”
People often only remember the first bit…
——
“ On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other”
The various Windows subsystems - Windows is built from the start to be able to impersonate other OSes. While the most obvious one is WSL (despite WSL2 being just a VM), there's an OS/2 Subsystem, a POSIX Subsystem, a Win32 subsystem...
Very few things actually run in kernel mode. There exists a almost-kernel-but-not-quite mode called executive mode, which is a much better option than Linux's all or nothing user-or-kernel (and, as far as I know, Mach has the same problem)
NT is a hybrid kernel: not quite monolithic, not quite micro. This allows Windows to do things like swapping your video drivers live as it's running, unlike Linux and Mach which would miserably crash. Hell, it can even recover from a video driver crash and restart it safely, and all you'll see is a few seconds of black screen.
The breadth of devices it supports is absolutely breathtaking. (well, in part because they very much have a hand in forcing manufacturers to respect the standards that they write)
Now, mind you, this is purely about technical merits: the NT Kernel is a miracle of technology. The APIs it exposes, and that most Microsoft products expose are downright batshit insane sometimes. But that's also what happens when you support 35 years of software. Also, the HANDLE pattern that most Win32 API uses is the superior alternative to dumb pointers (https://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html)
Oh and a bunch of The Old New Things articles, but I can't be arsed to look them up right now, sorry.
SS13 has been remade, SS14 https://spacestation14.io/ Its very playable today, and has a bunch of improvements to the original. Its also open source under an MIT License.
My grandfather probably spend 20 hours a week doing home genealogy work.
Going back to I guess the 80s, he always had the latest and greatest computer system in his home.
He wasn't super technical, but he knew how to use them for the things he cared about.
One year he hit an issue with a store-bought computer. I forget what the issue was, but he probably spent $5k on the computer, and it had hundreds, if not thousands of his work hours saved on it, and customer support led him down a path that wiped his hard drive.
After that, he would say, "Computers are light light bulbs, you can't trust them after a certain point..."
He complained about the customer support being so bad, so I told him we could just build one from pars if he wanted.
His eyes lit up, "You'd build me a computer?!"
So every 2 years, we would get together and build him a new computer.
He bought all the parts, and we'd build identical computers, one for him one for me... some of my fondest memories.
He got such a kick out of running performance benchmarks. 90-something year-old kid in a candy shop. He had to have the best parts.
From 1996 to 2016 or so, he had probably the most powerful gaming rig in Midland, TX... He had 3x 4k monitors, surround sound, and crazy silly amounts of RAM. Like... 128 GB was the last machine we built, back in 2016.
He'd always donate the "old one" to the church. I remember one year the kid they sent out had some IT knowledge. He was trying to write up a donation receipt, and Grandpa was like "64 gigabytes..." and the kid, thinking it was some old clunker since it was just sitting in an old Costco fruit-box at that point, was like, "Oh, you mean 64 megabytes of memory..." and Grandpa was like, in the most assertive tone an ultra-polite Mormon could muster, "No, sir. I mean gigabytes." This was like 2008 or so, when most high-end computers didn't have more than 8 GB of RAM. And Grandpa was just like, "It's got some old Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 Quad-SLI video cards..." And the kid was like, "Wait, how many video cards?" And Grandpa's attitude was like like, "Take that trash away, it's old and busted. Get it of my sight!" Ha.
He may have also liked playing flight simulators just a little. (=
If anyone nearby is reading this, please consider coming by sometime :)
(You need a reservation. Not everything works. In fact most machines don't work probably. It's not super fancy like the Living Computer Museum was. There's a lot of stuff on the floor. It'll probably move to a bigger place soon so that'll get better probably. It's not particularly cheap; there's a yearly fee (no auto-renewals) and a per-visit fee. There's probably almost nothing to do if you aren't fluent in Japanese.)
So far I fixed: ZX81, VIC-20, PET 2001, various MSX machines. (See my blog for details :p)
I owe my love for computers and thus who I am now to Intel (and Microsoft).
The first ever computer I interacted with was a 386 or 486 of some description that my parents bought to crunch paperwork and other such computer things. Knowing my dad, I'm 99% certain it was an Intel CPU of some sort in there. It ran Windows 3.11 For Workgroups and the sheer possibilities I could see were mindblowing for me.
The next computer, the first computer I got to have to myself (thanks mom, dad!) was an Intel Pentium. I think it was clocked at 166MHz? It ran Windows 95, I even installed it myself from like two dozen floppies. That really kicked off my love for computers.
So when someone asks why I support Intel? It's because they were and are a fundamental part of who I am, I owe a great deal of my computing passion and who I am today to their passion for amazing computing hardware. My childhood would not have been what it was were it not for Intel (and Microsoft).
In short, you could say there's an Intel Inside me.
https://x.com/ruuupu1
https://old.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/owdtpu/thats_why...
https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/anwgxf/here_is_an_e...
Modern emulators have post-processing filters to simulate the look, which is great. But it's not quite the same as the real thing.