II2II

I am not looking for particular content, just for something that is interesting to read. Typically, that falls into the realm of things that people are passionate about. It may be a project. It may be an issue. It may be something they research in their spare time. It may be silly, or it may be serious.

While extolling the virtues of the protocol may fit in that, it gets excessive. Blogs that border on diaries strike me as too personal.

It's not that I'm looking for something on the scale or scope of the web. People have already written bots that pull over interesting content anyhow. What I am looking for is an environment that I'm comfortable with participating in.

I love the idea of Gopher (even more so of Gemini), but the basic hurdle I run into is content. It feels like half of it is talking about how great gopher/gemini is, and the other half are deeply personal blogs. While the technology reflects the early days of the Internet, the content reflects the early days of blogging and social media (which came later). Rather than talking about things they are passionate about, they are talking about themselves.

True. Those who only care about meeting regulatory requirements are not going to care if the regulatory requirements cease to exist. Those who care about security may be dismissive of regulatory requirements, but they will do so primarily when they are insufficient or when they conflict with their opinion. In the former case, they probably have the ability to go beyond the regulatory requirements. In the latter case: while I won't claim that regulations are perfect, I would trust them over the an anonymous person who may be going on anything from their personal opinion to legitimate research.

The thing is, we tend to hear about the politicians who are ravenous for power, wealth, or recognition. The politicians who aren't (the backbenchers, the ones who run for local office, etc.) we rarely hear about outside of election cycles. While we may not agree with their politics, and may even go as far as disparaging their politics, it doesn't mean they are dishonest. It simply means that our personal values aren't aligned with the values of that politician.

Games were licensed long before Steam. Heck, I remember buying a game in the early 1990's that would disable use of the floppies once it was installed to the hard drive. By the time Steam rolled around, registration keys with online verification were normalized.

It's civil disobedience, at least once she refused to step aside when told to do so by the police officer. (I don't know if she was breaking the law by obstructing the robot.) So yeah, I would say there is nothing inherently wrong with you obstructing the entry of the local library -- provided you are willing to be peacefully arrested.

That doesn't mean that I agree with your right to obstruct entry into the library, nor does it mean that I agree with your reasons for blocking entry to the library. I also suspect that the courts would reject your reasoning.

The thing is, ham and hacker are defined in entirely different ways. Hackers can refer to people doing good, ill, or morally grey things. Think of how the term applies to certain software developers, people who breach networks to steal data, or circumvent security out of technical curiosity. In contrast, a ham is a licensed radio operator. While you certainly have lids, the vast majority have some sense of being a "good citizen" by the simple merit of being licensed. Unlicensed operators fit under other terms, like pirate.

Even the scope of the terms differ. Hackers have to make or break something. Hams may do anything from rag chew to build orbital satellites. If you're more inclined to do legal stuff and aren't inclined to build something, things involving community service are going to be more appealing.

Small, even tiny, homes are not a new thing. The house I grew up in was not much larger than the Futuro. A local museum has the house of a local artist inside, and it is about the size of a tiny home. Of course, you also have people living in mobile homes and trailers. I doubt that building codes have much to say on small homes, though zoning would.

That said, the design and materials would have an impact for more innovative designs.

I don't think anyone is claiming that the destruction of evidence is right or good for society. On the other hand, do we really want to live in a world where everyone needs to be paperwork pack rats? One thing that I can assure you is requiring the retention of documents that provide evidence of a crime, while allowing for the destruction of everything else after seven years, wouldn't have the desired outcome. (Though it would be amusing to see which corporations have the largest indefinite data retention warehouses if it did work!)

I also think the right and good for society means addressing crimes in a timely manner, which likely means more auditing by independent bodies. Punishing someone for a crime that happened 7+ years ago may feel good, but it is meaningless for a couple of reasons. Should we be punishing people who have reformed? And for those who don't reform, should we be letting criminal behaviour occur across multiple decades?

I wouldn't go that far. If it's a legal practice, it's a legal practice. I can understand why a company would want to limit their liability over something that happened seven years in the past, even when they are confident that their procedures are both rigorous and in compliance with the law.

On the whole, I would say the problem isn't so much using language to whitewash the practice as the troublesome tendency to turn a blind eye until someone becomes persona non grata.

Now you have me wondering how I would have responded to it back in the day. Personally, I avoided the humor sections of campus papers because they felt like more they were by written by teenagers pushing the boundaries (by going for shock value) than anything else.

> When I asked an AI how I would go about judging interest, building, raising funds, and manufacturing, it seems doable but expensive

Just a thought: make a small business out of setting up people's home networks and small business networks. The cost is negligible, you will learn about unmet demand, and you will be able to reach people who aren't technical in the process. It will cost you some money, in the sense that your service fees would almost certainly be less than your day job. On the other hand, potential customers would be paying you for market research and product development. In some respects, the market research will be more valuable in the sense that you are working with potential customers.

I say potential customers because selling a kit will reach different people. On the otherhand, it will tell you what has to go into that kit. For example: I doubt that flashing DD-WRT to existing hardware will suffice. There will be some people interested in that (someone else does the research, fear of bricking), but would those people commit to buying and setting up your product? Throw in a setup wizard that makes setting up ad blocking, VPN, or anything else that major vendors don't have much interest in simplifying, and you will likely have more success.

While it may be common, it certainly isn't universal. I've worked in schools in poor communities that have pushed for good educators. In one of those schools, the push for better teachers was by the students themselves. There are plenty of good kids and good parents in many poor communities.

I'm not sure the opposite is true either, i.e. that expensive homes are a proxy for good schools. I've also worked in schools where the families were affluent, but the environment was toxic due to the behaviour of students and parents.

> if you slide the mouse pointer to a specific point and press a keyboard key, the new key will not appear where the arrow is, it will appear where the text cursor is.

Out of curiosity: were they unfamiliar with the mouse, or were there programs that used a single cursor for both the keyboard and mouse? (I am aware that many text mode programs used a block for both cursors, but haven't seen a program where the two functions were combined.)

If the title is backed by professional standards, standards by which someone can lose the title and be held legally liable, then I can see the gatekeeping as valuable. If it is used to restrict who can write software, then I would see it as detrimental.

> The point is if a Linux distro setup isn't feeling 10x better than MacOS then that person can actually go ahead and either tweak that distro, or pick another one, and tweak that to possbily make that 1000x beter than MacOS.

Which may be great for you. I do it as well, though I'm not sure I would choose that path if I were starting out today. After all, modern systems are much more complex. At least I had the benefit of starting out with Linux in the 1990s, so my abilities grew as the operating system grew.

Yet even in those simpler times, most people would consider operating systems that they felt compelled to tweak as inferior. I many ways, they would rather deal with an operating system where everything is ready to go, whether they need it or not.

> Speakers, touchpad and battery life are inferior.

I suppose it depends upon the model, but I find my Lenovo Yoga's touchpad vastly superior to my MacBook Pro's touchpad. Tracking is fine on both, yet I'm having trouble trouble with the MacBook Pro consistently handling clicks. Granted, that is probably a software thing. As an added bonus, the Yoga has a touch screen which folds back, both of which are nice to have. (Agreed on the Mac speakers being significantly better though.)

> Cachyos with KDE is 10x better than MacOS.

That is subjective. I definitely agree with you, but a lot of people won't. Then again, I have been using Linux for about 30 years so modern macOS feels limiting and there is very little I can do about it.

I don't know what to think about this.

When I hopped onto the Linux bandwagon in the 1990's, the community was touting its amazing security because any damage done was compartmentalized to a particular account. (Of course, that ignores root escalations. Of course, few Linux users cared about that back then because it was an obscure operating system.) In contrast, Macintosh and Windows (non-NT) security was non-existent.

These days, I find increasing security measures both burdensome and restrictive. That said, it is also necessary. We have long left the era when one could trust supposedly reputable software vendors -- never mind random developers.

> it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off.

I have an M4 MacBook Pro. It gets hot. The fan kicks in, and it gets noisy. I can't say whether it is T14 noisy since I never heard one. As for the cool and fanless MacBook Air, my understanding is that Apple is quite aggressive with thermal throttling. That's perfectly acceptable, even desirable, under some workloads. Under other workloads, it is not.

The days of search for untrusted sources were numbered even without LLMs. LLMs are simply accelerating the process. Why would Google simultaneously watch one of its core products fail and fail to invest in what is likely to replace it?

I don't really buy into this theory that they want to keep all of their users on their site due to advertising revenues. The effectiveness of search engines has been degraded for decades due to SEO, and it seems as though search engines have been having an increasingly difficult time managing it in recent years. AI on the backend may help them contain it, but it comes at considerable expense. While it may help them grow their market share, it won't help them grow the market and it is a market where people expect the service for free. On the flip side, companies are already starting to sell AI services, so it can generate revenue even before advertising is factored into the picture.

I'm going to agree and disagree.

I agree that plain language queries is what people wanted. We've been seeing Google shift in that direction for well over a decade. And of course people are looking towards search engines for answers. There may be different expectations for where those answers are coming from, and there are cases where people are simply trying to source information, but those differences are likely just noise as far as Google is concerned.

I don't agree with people expecting advice or reassurance from a search engine. There will be some people who do that. It may even be a sizeable number of people. But using this article as an example that a majority of people want such a thing is silly.

I mean, look at the query. To the author, it was an attempt to source information. Yet the author also realised that the reader would need context to understand why Google's response was weird in their mind. What they failed to do was give context to Google, so the LLM interpreted it as asking for social advice.

New technology requires new approaches. It's as simple as that.

> Be the change in the world you want to see. Turn javascript off. Use real native applications that cannot change underneath you.

I'm not terribly familiar with this sort of software, but isn't the reason for embedding Chromium to have access to JavaScript. Sure, it was intended for the person running the OBS instance. Yet offering the end user that much power also opens up the possibility of them shooting themselves in the foot.

By far the easiest ones that would cause me to slide back into this habit come from channels I used to watch, then decided to stop watching. In a lot of cases, those channels produced videos I enjoyed. Yet I also found them hit-and-miss in terms of quality or the channel focussed upon long-form videos with too little content to justify the time watching them.

When I switched over to using an app, there was also a good chance that an algorithmically suggested video from an unfamiliar creator would capture my imagination. When I have looked at recommendations recently, I doubt that would be a problem today. Too much AI and human generated slop. Too many click-bait titles that barely give a hint on what the video is about, never mind why I should care about their take on it.

Then there are the days when I am both bored and exhausted. While I don't tend to watch much on those days, I have known myself to scroll through the recommendations to see if there is anything to occupy the time.

> I disagree. Basic etc still required effort.

I agree with BASIC taking effort, yet the baseline for effort has also changed. Over the span of my lifetime, we have gone from virtually everyone performing tasks without the aid of computers, to a few hobbyists and early adopters writing their own software, to buying software off the shelf, to using targeted online applications for free or nominal cost. At the same time people are expecting applications to be easier to use. As you suggested, constant churn in infrequently used applications can cause a lot of frustration.

Now I agree with you if the discussion is about using AI to immediately solve the problem at hand. I simply don't agree that it will end up with people creating reusable applications to perform the task. While overcoming the technical hurdles would be easy enough, I think that it takes a certain type of personality to think of creating a long term solution. Then there is describing the problem in a way that an LLM can translate into code, then there is the testing of the software generated.

For the most part, I've been using the apps for so long that compulsive viewing is not an issue on my end either. That said, I do have my days and I don't want to slide into that habit. By sticking to my curated list, I am limited to a couple of hours of videos a week. Quite often it turns out to be less since I've grown much more selective about what I will watch from that list.

> There's an obvious catch-22 here: either you are maintaining privacy, and the sponsor has no way to know whether their segment was viewed

The same way they did in the past, with broadcast radio and television: they base it on audience numbers rather than tracking whether people actually listened or viewed the ad. Besides, isn't one of the major motivators of tracking to avoid fraud? (Which I find ironic, given I don't view advertisers as very ethical in the first place.)

> Either way I fundamentally disagree with them on the idea that push advertising is ethical in the first place

The way I think of it: advertising doesn't have to be unethical, but it incentivizes unethical behaviour.

> Like did you also not fast-forward your VCR through ads in those days and instead dutifully watch attentively lest God know you were naughty?

I would typically walk away to do something else. Same outcome though. That said, I started to turn away from broadcast media in the early to mid-1990's. I forget whether it was due to advertising, but the end result was a lot less exposure to advertising. Which is a good thing IMHO.

One of the reasons why I use an app to view YouTube is to disable suggested videos and comments. Basically, I want to have a personalized list of the channels I view as worth watching and I want to discourage continued watching outside of those boundaries.

A better analogy would be an explosives manufacturer saying that it is okay to use their explosives on military targets, but not civilian targets. Comparing AI to pens trivialises its potential impact.

Incidentally the second stipulation, the restriction on domestic surveillance, sounds like direct recognition of the role IBM played in the Holocaust. Of course, the better course of action would be to deny the military access to their technology. But that's not going to happen because there is so much money on the table.

I doubt that we are entering a world where people will be using AI to write their own little apps, and that is coming from someone who does it.

All you need to do is look at history to realise that. We had things like BASIC, HyperCard, and the early web that attracted droves of people who were excited by the opportunities. While a lot of those people went into industry to write software for other people, a lot did not. Most people, I suspect, didn't even explore the potential because they simply don't think of computers as programmable machines -- even if they were aware that there are people who program computers for a living.

It's more of a generation thing. Early 2D games had atrocious graphics as well, both due to technical limitations and the inexperience of game designers. You could probably say much the same of text-based games. (At least on personal computers, it was true.)