hhhAndrew

I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would enjoy a sleepy midwestern memoir. Which it wasn't, quite. Always that Wolfe thing where you know something else is going on ...

Gene Wolfe, Peace

I will admit, I needed the spoiler afterwards to untangle it.

Shower thought: If a rogue AI agent can spread across the internet, it might be regulated under the same ruleset as other self-replicating dangerous critters: biosecurity / quarantine type laws. E.g. Who is allowed to own some live smallpox/agents? Who is allowed to study smallpox/agents to make a better smallpox/agent? Who is allowed to carefully expose smallpox/agent to environments where it can thrive? Some people, potentially, are allowed, under some rather regulated conditions ... but not, like, 10,000s of employees of some tech giants.

This is part of the picture. But IIUC Telstra is very keen to keep that "obligation". Why? Because along with it they 1. Are fairly free to decide where to put payphone (eg next time you are in the city, notice sometimes they are slightly impeding pedestrian traffic in the city), and 2. They are allowed to place and sell advertising on the sides which makes bank due to 1. Despite the above I love that my kid can just dial my number on any payphone, and they like prank calling me, and they have duly memorised my number .

Over the years, I have noticed there are two specific places where my kids ALWAYS smile ALL the time. 1. Trampoline. 2. Pool.

Interesting, I was about to say -1, 0.9, 1.0, because I don't know is almost as useful as the correct answer!

OK I love used books but this diatribe is a thing of beauty.

Mathematica is the earliest thing I am aware of with this feature where it was Alt+. to expand selection in their notebook interface starting in the early 90s. But the thing I miss most that I still can't shake the muscle memory of after almost a decade of not using much Mathematica, is that single/double/triple/n-click scaled this way as well. So double-click selected a whole word (as in all editors), triple-click selected all the comma-separated multiple args of a function, 4-click for f(a,r,g,s), and so on.

Yep on ChromeOS each user's home dir is separately encrypted with their own password.

+1 DJGPP/Allegro key life experience on my parents Windows machine, thankyou!

After reading TFA, I have to cop this as fair criticism :). Thanks.

Agreed with others it's just what you're used to. I was inverted-y for most of my gaming life because I started with flight sims where it was mandatory, reflecting the real life hardware. So I used the same in FPS games when they came around. Decades later I had kids and had to spend some time sharing a mouse with them, and didn't want to condemn them to a life of having to look for "inverted Y axis" in the settings of every game (+1 to the post above who requested an OS-level setting for this!), so I left it on the default in Minecraft and learned the other way. Now I'm actually bilingual and can swap from one to the other with about 2 minutes warm up time. This is the same as what happens with driving on the left/right side of the road if you spend a lot of time in different countries driving.

With my kids I drew the grumpy line at Minecraft's new Autojump setting tho ... They had to learn with that disabled.

One idea for what happens next, that rhymes with pop-up blocker revolution, is Gates' "disintermediation of everything" via AI, where agents on our behalf will be able to "find me a video I like and don't show me the ads", "renew my electricity contract and don't let them soft-scam me with their tricky pricing structure", "buy groceries online and don't get tricked into buying candy from a promo", etc. Agents make become like popup blockers in that way. Subsequent to that, I reckon we may see some sites adopting TOS forbidding people to have AI agents visit on their behalf.

(Maybe skip the mini-insults & make the site nicer for all?)

Anyway I think GP has a point worth considering. I have had a related hope in the context of journalism / chain of trust that was mentioned above: if anyone can produce a Faux News Channel tailored to their own quirks on demand, and can see everyone else doing the same, will it become common knowledge that Stuff Can Be Fake, and motivate people to explicitly decide about trust beyond "Trust Screens"?

This is how Eiffel works. Instead of private, protected, public, you specify the set of classes a method can be seen by: `feature {ANY}` for `public:`, feature {NONE} for private, feature {Self} (IIRC) for protected, feature {Foo, Bar} for descendants of Foo and those of Bar, etc.