1bent

I run Firefox Nightly on Android, haven't seen anything like this. Besides the usual adblockers I run noscript, maybe that's the fix?

This sounds like the backstory for Alan Dean Foster's "Cyber Way". I enjoyed the novel, didn't realize how well rooted it was in actual history.

As long as I can avoid or disable "AI", I'll continue to ignore it. Consistent, reliable, predictable, that's what I want from my computers. Boring is good.

I'd never heard of her, so I checked wikipedia. Try that.

One domain that a little OO seems to map to without too much pain is GUI libraries. The first OO-flavoured API I ever used was Sunview, the early GUI I used on Sun-3 workstations with SunOS. It was a beautiful API; I was never tempted to mess with the verbose, complex "Intrinsics-based" toolkits that followed it. It carried on with xview; that's what I'd try if I wanted to write a GUI in C today.

djbdns is simple, easy to understand, easy to configure; it embodies a clear understanding of how DNS works.

Unlike BIND and dig, it was designed after DNS had been in use for a while.

Like sendmail, BIND suffers from being designed before anyone knew what it would need to do.

OOP has always felt to me like it was inspired by writing GUI APIs; Sun's Suntools -> Sunview -> xview (if I'm remembering the names right) were early-mid 1980s C, and felt beautifully OO, and very clean to write GUI programs. I enjoyed writing image analysis and manipulation in them. Never used the successor "intrinsics-based" Motif and CDE, the code was yucky. Didn't write another GUI until I did a dashboard (for automated software deployment) in TCL/Tk. But yeah, C++ never interested me for OO, C was fine.

Thank you!

I find it tempting to try and shove this story into an origin tale for W.E.I.R.D. --- Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.

But I guess the timing is off; this is within, not before, that.

I'd heard of it from Heinlein, but never thought it might be real.

I think of audiobooks as a very different form from books; I read lots of books, but listen to almost no audiobooks, though I've bought a few, and have listened to my favourite, Spider Robinson reading a collection of Heinlein short stories, a few times.

For me, books allow me to listen (with my mind's inner voice) to the author's voice directly; a human's dramatic performance gets between my imagination and the author.

When I want to enjoy hands- and eyes-free reading, I turn on TTS in my ebook-reading app; the mechanical, robotic voice doesn't get between me and the author. It's more like reading with my eyes.

Back before Android, I'd use flite (Festival Lite, a simple, single-file, pure-C spinoff of the Festival TTS research project) to convert a few books from txt to wav, then to ogg, and load them on an iRiver before a long drive.

I do like Librivox as a recommendation service; there's a lot of books in Project Gutenberg, but the ones that get to Librivox had one or more volunteers who thought that book worth the time and effort to read aloud.

Can you buy a new car without a data plan anymore?