m-i-l

Interesting that all the quotes above start "the first" or "the world's first" followed by some very specific definition.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware#... which does list the CSIRAC but I'm not sure which combination of options you need to get it to be "The world's fourth digital computer".

For anyone else triggered in the same way as me, I think the other three are:

- Colossus 1943–1945 "the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer" [0]

- ENIAC 1945 "the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer" [1]

- Manchester Baby 1948 "the first electronic stored-program computer" [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fish

I believe it is the first eCommerce platform where all the products have date as an important feature and where the search and navigation are by date - the thinking being it could help people find interesting and original birthday presents and anniversary gifts. I've also built it as a multi-vendor platform so it can hopefully live on once I've sold my things. Note that I'm the only seller and it is all UK based at the moment, but it has just been launched.

I've a blog post with more info at https://michael-lewis.com/posts/vintagepresents.com-date-bas... if anyone is interested.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fish

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Gold_(Spain)

The "good bots" which identify themselves and follow the rules are easy enough to block, so not a problem. It is the "bad bots" which pretend to be real users and hide behind residential proxies, and so are almost impossible to block at the moment, which are the problem.

Given that there are big companies openly (i.e. on the clearweb, not even darkweb) selling access to these residential proxy botnets of compromised smart TVs[0] and mobile phones and other devices, can we not simply get a database of the these IPs and block access from them? I would venture that almost every single one of those residential users are unaware that they have devices in their homes which have been compromised and are being abused in this way, so if they were to start seeing messages from more and more sites along the lines of "Access to this site has been blocked because unusual traffic has been detected from your computer network. Please check all devices on your network and remove any malware which may be routing this traffic." then maybe we could start addressing the problem at the source.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000864

If their real motivation was "to fix Britain's housing crisis", brownfield sites can be converted into residential use much more quickly and easily, and there is a lot of pre-existing support to make this easier - see e.g. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/brownfield-land-registers .

Hiroshima and Nagasaki had radiation - many died in the following months from the "atomic bomb disease", now known to be acute radiation sickness, and many died in the following years from cancer, for example. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions_... for details of all the different ways a nuclear explosion can cause death or injury in the initial stage (1-9 weeks), intermediate stage (10-12 weeks), late period (13-20 weeks), and delayed period (20+ weeks). Bear in mind that the effects of radiation weren't well understood at the time.

Furthermore, all the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their children "were (and still are) victims of severe discrimination when it comes to prospects of marriage or work due to public ignorance about the consequences of radiation sickness, with much of the public believing it to be hereditary or even contagious"[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibakusha

Edit: There is also https://pureselfmade.com/ which uses Piggott turbine designs.

However, from the article: "This may not always be classic foreign interference in the state-backed sense. Sometimes it's much more banal. It's in some ways more depressing, ... People sitting thousands of miles away working out that Canadian outrage is a profitable niche. I think they may not actually care about Canadian politics at all."

I wonder how "free speech absolutists" defend the idea of people in low-income countries using these platforms to spread outrage simply to make themselves a little money (and the platform owners a lot of money), rather than to "exercise their right to free speech" or whatever, given these people aren't saying anything they believe in (let alone have any interest in or even knowledge of). Not that you can really call it free speech if you are being paid to do it.

Amazon wasn't profitable because it reinvested earnings into growth, while SpaceX is funding it's growth by taking on very significant levels of debt (which will take a big chunk of future earnings just to service). These aren't comparable from a risk perspective.

[0] https://developers.google.com/nearby/connections/overview

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/nearbyinteraction

- It had to be an app because the web NFC API[0] only allows a browser to act as an NFC reader rather than emulate an NFC card. Nothing stopping other functionality outside of the tap-to-connect working in a browser of course.

- Permissions to act as an NFC card were fairly easy to set up on Android, but needed specific developer permissions for Apple[1], which had to be applied for[2][3].

Worth also noting that other proximity techniques such as QR scanning and geolocation are much more easily spoofed than NFC, making them much less useful as a proof-of-human validation.

[0] https://w3c-cg.github.io/web-nfc/

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc/cardsessio...

[2] https://developer.apple.com/support/nfc-se-platform/

[3] https://developer.apple.com/support/hce-transactions-in-apps...

In opening up a few ancient files to answer another question about formatting, I found some long forgotten notes on how to make my Epson LQ400 24 pin printer work at 360dpi rather 180dpi, which may have been the same for you: First you had to install it as a NEC 24-pin 360dpi printer rather than 180dpi printer. Then, because it used fonts of half the size, you needed to switch fonts. So I had two fonts disks, one with 180dpi installed fonts and one with 360dpi fonts, and used the ASSIGN.SYS file to switch between them. It also seems to have taken twice as long to print out at 360dpi, and used twice as much printer ribbon:-)

Also relevant here: https://searchmysite.net/ - a search engine for personal websites.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31395231

[0] "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers", to quote Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page in their "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" paper from 1998.

Also some great quotes from 30 years ago, e.g. Carl Sagan's "when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few" the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness". But did it actually have to end up this way? And is it still possible (with enough collective will power) to push Big Tech profiteering back enough to deliver some of the society enhancing changes originally envisioned in the mid-1990s? Just as it took decades for the full positive implications of the invention of the printing press to come to fruition, perhaps we still need more time before we decry the internet as a net negative?