joblessjunkie

Really enjoyed this.

But I believe the goal isn’t a place - some absolute location to the right. The goal is an action: to always be in the state of holding the right d-pad button down, or taking some intermediate action so we can go back to holding the right d-pad down again.

BASIC had been aggressively trimmed down to fit into an 8K ROM on the first machines, and there just wasn’t room for much more than crude SAVE and LOAD commands unless we gave up something else. Expanded “disk basic” variants came later, but these were all non-standard.

CP/M and DOS were indeed pretty weak, but this was a time where being first to market with a minimum viable app was everything, and then compatibility with what had already shipped first stalled progress.

We are in an era of extreme demand for GPU and limited supply. Every inference we push to the edge frees cloud resources for other tasks. Every efficiency gain increases what we can achieve with existing resources. If images can be rendered with half as much compute, we need half as many GPUs.

Laughing agreement. I’m very sentimental for BASIC.

By the standard of getting kids started it’s an amazing and wildly successful language.

By any other standard, it is absolutely terrible! It commits every famous programming sin! Stay away! Do not learn from this language! LOL

I’m a greybeard, I played Oregon trail on the II and remember the first Mac.

IMO Apple (well, Jobs) was always trying to create a sealed, perfect appliance for regular people, even in the very early days. Apple worked very hard to hide all implementation details. Hackers, on the contrary, want to see and tweak all those hidden details. The complaints today were the same in the 80s.

To his credit, Jobs finally got there. My mother is in her 70s and the iPad is the only computer she’s ever used.

Reminds me quite a bit of Asimov’s “The Last Question”, which mines the same “computer-as-God” vein, is also very short, and has a suspiciously related title. Asimov’s story appeared in 1956, just two years later.

GDPR states that consent must be freely given. If there are financial incentives, the consent may be invalid.

Bandcamp workers voted to unionize five months ago. Is this a bust?

As an old fart who actually used a typewriter, I must point out that the bell does not ring when you press the carriage return. The bell rings when you are nearing the end of the line to warn you that you are bout to run out of paper.

On carriage return, the sound should be a slow swing of the heavy carriage physically returning.

I agree, "legitimate" companies usually want to comply and to do right by their users. That's why I get hired.

But currently the entire online analytics and advertising industries are hanging by this thread.

I am not a lawyer, but my full-time work involves reviewing codebases for GDPR and CCPA compliance.

I do not believe this strategy will achieve what OP is hoping.

In response to a deletion request, Reddit instead seeks to anonymize the data. Anonymous data is not personal data, so anonymous data is not covered by GDPR.

If you submit a GDPR deletion request, they will in this way wriggle into a position where they claim GDPR does not apply.

When Reddit (or most any other website) soft-deletes an account, they simply obfuscate the user's identifiers such as username and IP address. They argue that this is sufficient to make the mass of remaining data anonymous, and therefore not covered by any privacy law.

This is an extremely common position for websites. However, it requires that the remaining data truly be anonymous. For Reddit, this is absurd, as the free-form content of the website allows any amount of identifying information to be uploaded. Reddit simply cannot guarantee that identities cannot be deduced from what remains.

I believe this is fundamentally in violation of GDPR, but I am not a GDPR regulator with the power of enforcement.

This requires a legal appeal to the regulatory bodies.

There are many correct answers here, but I recommend the Pentax K1000. It is possibly the world's #1 most-manufactured camera, and was the standard camera for beginner photography classes throughout the 80s and 90s.

There are vendors on eBay that specialize in this camera and have literally 100s of cameras in stock.

Early models are all-metal, while later ones incorporate some plastic, but are consequently lighter. At this age, I wouldn't worry about the reliability difference of the two, and simply plan to replace the body if it fails.

The Pentax K-mount has a lot of cheap, good glass. The 50/1.8 is standard and fabulous, the 28/2.8 and 135/4 are also amazing and can be had for under $50.

The camera is entirely manual, with no autofocus or autoexposure available. Optionally, you can put a button cell battery in it to power a simple exposure meter, visible as a needle indicator in the viewfinder.

I've been shooting these for 40 years, so I'm a bit biased, but I do recommend them just for their ubiquity and cheap replaceability.

Under CCPA, businesses do not "demand" data because there is no restriction on its collection. Businesses simply need to provide notice of what they collect.

Consumers cannot opt out of this collection.

Consumers do have the option to opt out of having their personal information resold to third parties. The CCPA then specifically restricts businesses from withholding services or providing you with reduced services as penalty for this opt-out.

CCPA may not be perfect or even well-explained, but it's a first step in a positive direction within the United States. I think it's unfair to call it "useless".

I appreciated this article. I agree that "Microsoft was never in it for the history."

Not to sound cynical, but I believe MSFT wasn't trying to sell encyclopedias, they were trying to sell CD-ROM drives.

The upcoming Windows 93 (whoops, we slipped a little, make that 95) was going to require a billion floppy disks for distribution. Retail products were shipping in large boxes with comically tall stacks of expensive floppy disks.

CD-ROMs, on the other hand, are so cheap to distribute that AOL mailed them out as unsolicited junk mail.

It was worth sinking some money into a bunch of high-quality CD-ROM titles to get those drives standard on all PCs. Once that task was accomplished....

You are of course correct; mea culpa.

We had internet; what we didn't yet have was HTTP.