II2II

I was going to say that curring hours just offloads the problem onto their employees, but the reality is it does that and creates new problems for the bbusiness.If the employee cannot afford to keep the job, they will be forced to search for a new or additional job. The business is either hiring and training inexperienced people, or dealing with staff who have reduced availability.

They also cannot do much about fixed costs; postponing maintenance typically increases long term maintenance costs; postponing upgrades, cutting amenities, and raising prices may deter even more customers (keep in mind, nearly everyone is feeling the pinch these days). That is assuming that the business isn't doing that already.

> There were Apple II clones with varyingly clever schemes around copying the original ROMs, and it provided slots so many manufacturers could provide hardware for the machines.

It looks like the vast majority of clones used a (near bit-by-bit) copy of the original ROMs. I've only heard of one company using licensed ROMs and one company using reverse engineered ROMs in the American market.

> And let's not forget the ubiquitous S-100 bus, with hundreds of different companies making hardware for. In 1983 you could assemble a computer around your choice of processor, graphics (or not), IO, mass-storage, and so on.

These machines, in conjunction with CP/M, were the closest thing to what the IBM compatible would become, in terms of it being an open platform. Unfortunately, they were also notorious for being incompatible with each other. As you noted, they didn't have to use even remotely similar processors. Heck, you couldn't even exchange disks between many variants (the format was incompatible).

> Entirely accidental. What really started this was the reverse engineering of the BIOS.

Not really. IBM didn't intend the clones, but the effort to create clones was intentional. Not only did you have the outright rip-offs and famously cleanroom reverse engineered ROMs, but you had many companies making machines with various levels of compatibility while trying be legal. Once the PS/2 arrived, IBM's attempt to regain control of the platform, there was a concerted effort by their competitors to ensure they (rather than IBM) defined the standard.

I'm dreading the day I need/want to look for another job!

That said, there may be contexts where their advice would help. It's likely useless in all organizations that have a human resources department, since they will be dictating policy and may even be doing the initial screening. But smaller businesses? Quite often their handling of applications isn't all that different from my grandparent's day. Replacing that emailed resume with a hand delivered one may be enough to get their attention.

I also wonder how applicable modern approaches would be in towns and smaller cities. Something tells me they would rather only deal with local candidates and not have a bunch of people who apply from out of their area.

Given the context, most people would consider a machine as something designed and built by people. With respect to babies: we cannot do the former (yet) and I think most people would consider the latter to be a bit of a stretch (growth and development is a bit different from the common notion of building, even if it is a biological process occurring within a person).

While someone can probably cite a more intricate machine that can reasonably be held within a hand, the assemblage of features in a phone certainly makes it one of the more complex machines of its size. Especially when you consider how many fields it draws upon. Digital electronics is sufficiently different from RF electronics, the RF spectrum behaves differently (from an engineering standpoint) from the optical spectrum. That accelerometer may be packaged like an IC but MEMS are quite different from a CPU or solid state memory. The list could go on.

When you are comparing online job boards to employment centres and classifieds, they are more accessible and available. Employment centres always involved making a dedicated trip. Newspapers cost money and may involve a dedicated trip to fetch one. Not to mention that plenty of businesses simply didn't advertise jobs in print, particularly entry level jobs. Part of that may have been expectations: people would actually walk into businesses to drop off applications or see if openings are available. Again, it took a lot more effort to find those jobs.

Fun tidbit, I remember visiting Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) in the early 2010's. Boom times for them. It was a bit like walking into a different era with respect to job seeking since many business (again, entry level jobs) were advertising with help wanted signs in their windows.

> You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard.

I'm not sure that is any less true today. If you were looking for a job, people used to go to a job centre or look at the classifieds. Since everyone did it, those were also the jobs with the most competition. Swap job centre and classifieds for online job boards, and you have the situation today. Yes, you have more people applying for the same jobs. On the other hand, that is balanced out by people applying for more jobs. It's hard to claim that applying for more jobs involves more work, though there is certainly a negative psychological impact.

On the other hand, knowing where to look (then or now) cuts out a lot of the competition. Having a social network feeding you that information cuts out even more competition.

I encountered one corporation where you walked up to security, told them you were there to look for work, and they directed you to an office that contained posting of currently available positions. As far as I know, they didn't advertise job openings anywhere else. If you weren't willing to drop by their offices, they weren't interested in considering you.

Of course, talking to anyone about a job within the building was an entirely different matter.

Another tidbit, based upon finding out which company the phone number belonged to: you could go to the library and access business directories. Think the yellow pages, only they were geared towards businesses rather than towards consumers. Print versions were broken down by industry, but electronic ones (on CD-ROM) were searchable. It was also a tool for looking for unadvertised jobs, since those directories seemed to be geared towards making cold calls (albeit, for people doing sales).

It's hard to say.

From a vintage computing perspective, possibly. The only question is whether they will work. Oddly, I have found USB sticks to be less reliable than floppy disks. (Odd because I would think that semi-conductor memory would last longer than a ferrous coating glued to a plastic substrate that is dragged along both the read/write head and the shell and is known to be susceptible to mould.)

Other uses, I just don't know. Floppy disks have a well defined appearance that means they are iconic. (Sometimes literally so!) USB sticks vary so much in size and appearance that it will be difficult to earn the iconic status. Floppies also have more to work with when it comes down to arts projects.

Because the C standard is notorious for saying things like the minimum size of an `int` is 16 bits. Changes in the size of data types would create issues when calling the Windows API or saving data to disk. Heck, the program is from the very early 1990's. C wasn't standardized until 1989 and compilers were notorious for having their own interpretation of C (what we would call extensions these days). Finally, developers often optimize large programs with machine dependent code. In the early 1990's, a full featured word processor would be considered a very large program.

Even today, C is not a terribly portable language when compared to it's modern peers. It is portable when compared to assembly languages and languages contemporary to its creation.

My favourite, while being stranded on a trail with a broken bike: teleport across a lake, drive fifteen minutes, then hop on a bus. Apparently you are SOL if you don't have a car.

There are definitely better apps out there, unfortunately my area requires Maps for transit data.

Maybe they're right, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

Perhaps the problem is our desire to have everything, no matter what the compromises are. Perhaps the problem is our inability to say, I'm going to go with product X even though it lacks Y because we actually own X. There is virtually no incentive for competition to pop up in such an environment since established companies have a lead of years, decades if you consider the size of the established companies, so consumers will follow their lead.

I don't mean to suggest that buying alternatives is a solution to the problem as a whole, but doing so may allow enough niche products to survive to give those of us who are interested in alternatives and alternative to choose from.

No for Whispersync. Kobo only offers synchronization for books purchased through them. On the other hand, KOReader does offer synchronization.

Odd. The Libra 2 (the successor to the Libra H2O) had a uSD card with a conformance coating over it. Of course, the Libra Colour uses eMMC. I wonder why then went back and forth then back again. (All three are advertised as water resistant.)

My apologies for a lack of clarity in that sentence, but I meant that publishers have to contend with people who are willing to use generative AI to make money by writing books for them.

That said, real people write for all sorts of reasons. Money is definitely one of them. Sometimes it is out of ignorance (e.g. they don't know that few books earn much money). Sometimes it is out of delusion (e.g. some authors are clearly raking in the money, they think they will too).

Publishing is a business. There will be real publishers who are interested in using AI for the sake of making money. Even when a publisher has integrity and refuses to sell AI generated books, they have to contend with authors who are only interested in making money.

I'm not sure if I'm using the right term here, but publishers have been using rotating ghost writers to write series for generations and many of the authors have been happy to translate outlines into books just to earn a living. (I know of ghost written series that my father read as a child. I'm by no means young, and he had children late in life before it became fashionable to wait to have children until they were older.)

> In the vast, vast majority of cases it is not to make money (virtually none of them do).

If you're suggesting that virtually no authors write books to make money, I would suggest that is not true and the landscape is going to change for the worse. There are constraints on how many authors write books purely to make money because writing takes time and effort, with the returns being notoriously low. AI eliminates the time and effort factor. Returns don't have to be high if it is being generated by a content mill. If anything, diluting the market will result in lower returns for human authors -- discouraging them from writing in the first place.

I agree it won't work, albeit for an entirely different reason. There has been a shift towards labelling AI generated or AI assisted content by those who aren't attempting to mislead. Those who are attempting to mislead won't.

As for AI assisted edits, the article is quite clear about the labelling covering AI generated content. If you "hire" the AI as an editor by asking it to check your grammar or point out weak arguments, then do the rewrite yourself, it almost certainly wouldn't be covered. It sounds like it wouldn't be covered if you asked it to apply edits for style either, just be sure to log the changes since it would clearly be in an AI's voice.

> If I open my own line of home improvement stores and do no oversight on what I sell and wind up selling really dangerous lawnmowers, I'm partly responsible.

While there would be oversight, it is highly unlikely that a person opening a home improvement store would perform any meaningful safety testing. They simply would not be qualified. The oversight would lay in selling certified products, pulling recalled products off the shelf, and (perhaps) removing products if there is a reason to suspect safety issues.

Now consider streaming sticks. There are safety standards for the physical device but, to my knowledge, there are no such standards for the software itself. Heck, there aren't even standards for the engineers who work on the software. One can make highly prejudiced decisions based upon the country of origin. Perhaps there are even good reasons to avoid products from certain countries. Yet the lack of standards also means that products from trustworthy sources can be suspect, since all it takes is a management decision to change things.

> I have actually heard otherwise intelligent people say things just like that, including site operators who run nontrivial websites.

First of all: thank you for using the word say, rather than think or believe or anything of that ilk. Too many of these discussions reduce to attributing or misattributing motivations to people.

That said, I still have issues with that statement. Let's assume that you are talking about an intelligent person who works in tech. Chances are something was taken out of context because they probably know what VPNs are for and that they have legitimate uses. Sometimes they miss context because they are not expressing their ideas clearly. Sometimes we miss context because we hear something we violently oppose to, and ignore the rest.

Another issue is that categorizing and vilifying people genuinely doesn't help the cause. At best, people will ignore the counter points. At worse, it will push people further away. We have to listen and educate based upon issues that are relevant to the audience.

Simplistic responses like, "freedom of speech" won't solve anything because those words have lost meaning. Too many people scream "freedom of speech" to excuse what they are saying, while they are active in suppressing the freedom of speech of others. Too many people use the freedom of speech as a tool to intimidate others, to restrict the speech or legal actions of others, because they are more interested in imposing their values on others rather than challenging the values of others. We should be illustrating ways that freedom of speech are relevant using examples that are relevant to the people we are speaking to. In the case of framing freedom of speech for people who are concerned with abortion: pro-life people may respond better to presenting freedom of speech as a safe stage to promote the sacredness of life, while pro-choice people may respond better to framing the freedom of speech as a safe way to seek out information relating to getting an abortion.

Likewise, people can see through simplistic attacks like accusing others of using children for leverage in an argument. Most of the people who say "think of the children" are trying to dismiss people who are trying, legitimately, to protect a vulnerable class. There are plenty of good reasons why the policy mechanisms to protect a vulnerable class may be objectionable, yet framing one's opposition with a reductionist interpretation of intent pushes people apart when they ought to be seeking out better solutions. For example: two people may agree that underage access to porn has to be dealt with, but disagree on the role that VPNs play in circumventing restrictions. So talk about how VPNs are not an age-based access control mechanism. Talk about the misclassification of information about gender and sexuality as pornography, assuming it is relevant to who you are talking to. Talk about the other benefits that VPNs offer in maintaining a free society. In other words, get them on your side and start seeking out better solutions.

I don't know what the situation is like for Kindle, but there are atleast two open source alternatives for Kobo. KOReader is the Swiss Army knife, Plato is easier to use.

A few people are suggesting that KOReader is symptomatic if the issues with open source software. The reality is it targets a particular group of users.

A lot of people are misconstruing what I have said, which is pointing out that this can impact regular users. It not intended as a justification to restrict on-device ADB, and it certainly isn't meant to justify more extreme measures. That being said, we should not ignore what happens in the real world since the consequences are real.

> In other words: this is all but impossible to impact regular users, and it requires a particularly careless developer to be hit by it.

Have you ever worked with someone who barely knows how to use a mobile phone? They will hand their phone over to someone they barely even know to do something they don't understand. They will follow instructions from a stranger over the phone, without understanding what the phone is warning them about.

I have worked with such a person. They did have someone walk them through a dubious process. Thankfully they realized what was going on before the process was complete, but who knows how much damage was done by the initial steps.

There are legitimate security reasons here. Whether there are reasons beyond that is an open question.

> It is really annoying to write something and have someone say (...)

It's worse than that. What they are saying is the equivalent to saying that knowing how to do something properly, and having the attention to detail to do so, makes it obvious it was written by AI. It sounds like a prelude to human incompetence, to ensuring that AI products are better than human ones.

About the only semi-convincing argument that I've heard is that AI over uses these tells. But let's face reality here: a lot of people griping about AI generated or AI assisted writing are not looking at over use. Plus a lot of people tend to over use the said tells while they learn how to use them properly.

> Agreed, this is what you agreed to (implicitly or explicitly) when uploading stuff to the internet.

A more pragmatic approach is to acknowledge that concerning one's self with how something is used once it has been released is an emotional drain. It is a bit much to suggest that someone agreed to something, even if that agreement is implicit, just because they released it.

> But people are free to not publish things or post things online with a more restrictive license.

Licences are meaningless unless you have the ability to enforce them (e.g. to sue). That's why so many companies are willing to ignore the terms of open source licenses. It's also why the attempts of enforcement that we do hear about are usually backed by a third party, rather than being done by the software developer themselves. Simply put, the individual developer (or even small project) trying to make a contribution to the community would be better served by not publishing (instead of using a restrictive license) if they are concerned about how their work is used.

I don't even know if there is a good way to resolve the problem. Consider something like a DMCA Takedown notice. It removes the administrative and legal overhead to copyright infringement, yet it is also easy to abuse. For example: businesses have weaponized it by using it against individuals. Perhaps my cynicism is taking over here, but I suspect any easily accessible mechanism for enforcement would be similarly abused.

> But now I'm really reluctant to give more stuff to the free web. Because the fact that it gets scraped and added to a pile of training data to later be monetized really rubs me the wrong way.

The thing is, people were scraping and monetizing other people's websites long before the current LLM fad. The difference is the magnitude of the problem.

> And I can see why maintainers of sites like this, or other free but incredibly useful resources might start to get irate at that.

Those who object to the scraping fall into several camps, but the biggest complaint I am hearing is that it increases both maintenance costs and time. In other words: it sucks when people are using your work in a manner that you find offensive, but it goes beyond that by doing actual harm.

> now there's better tech to do native ads without the intrusion and massive bad experience .... the publisher themselves can serve you a small ad

This has always been possible and, from my recollections, was how some early online advertising was done. (I don't know if it was ever the dominant model, but it was certainly more common.)

I suspect the difficulty connecting content providers with advertisers is the root of them problem. After that, it takes effort to maintain that relationship. Having a third party handle everything is simply easier, especially for smaller web sites and smaller companies who want to advertise.

Because every time something new comes along, people will push boundaries while arguing it is acceptable. In this case, they may argue that it is no different from physically furnishing an apartment, taking some photos, then removing the furniture. At least in terms of representing the product. Clearly using AI is much easier and cheaper than physically furnishing the apartment for a couple of hours. Some may even genuinely believe this, seeing it as more a tool of convenience than something that doesn't always represent physical reality.

> (Speaking as a parent of three) why can't we just leave all responsibility to the parents?

Then I'm sure that you appreciate that there are both legal and informal checks in place ensuring that you can take responsibility for your children in the offline world. For example: I would be surprised if your children were able to play organized sports without your permission. Failing to ask for permission would deny you the responsibility of protecting your child as you see fit.

While I agree on bit about horrible prices, the TI calculators are well suited to their intended task[1] so I will object to the outdated hardware part. Stability is a good thing in the context of classrooms. Why should schools be spending money on replacement hardware, software, and textbooks when the curriculum itself is fundamentally unchanged?[2]

[1] Except the screens on the older models were truly horrible, from a brightness and contrast perspective.

[2] From my recollection, the calculators interfaced with hardware and software from other vendors. Then, of course, there was the vendor lock-in provided by textbook publishers.

> yes there were folks from before that saw a PDP or whatever but they were rare, and usually either deep in academia or IBM etc.

Was it a case of being rare, or of computers being something they used at work (and only work) so they simply didn't talk about computers outside of that context?

Judging from stories of the early days of personal computers, those people mostly fell into two camps: those who were excited about getting their hands on a computer of their own, and those who dismissed personal computers as useless toys. The latter would make the number of people exposed to computers seem artificially small.

I bring this up because I have encountered people who used minis and mainframes over the years. They were a fixture in major corporations and even medium sized businesses by the late 1970's (which is when personal computers started getting the attention of the public).