At the risk of coming over as an enormous weirdo, but most of my warm fuzzy childhood memories about books are with non-fiction technical books. There were some fiction books too, but nothing that stands out nearly as much back then…

I’ll never forget the Commodore 64 user manual. Don’t know if that counts as a book, but at least it was bound like one. It’s unimaginable for a computer manual today, but it contained a whole BASIC programming course, which was my first encounter with the whole topic of programming. Building on that, another book that got deeper into Basic and C64 computer internals. That latter one is the most wonderful written computer book I’ve ever had. It’s not specifically targeted at children, but written in a way that a child can understand it… not sure that genre of book exists anymore. Apart from that, hobby electronics books. Many of them, even more than computer stuff.

Oh and then there was that one book about music making on the Commodore Amiga, music was my other big fascination besides technology stuff. One unforgettable moment was when I read the part where it explained how to use copy/paste in the music software I was using. I had no clue about copy/paste in general at that point. Almost all the software was in English, and I didn’t speak English as a child, so I figured out how to use programs with a lot of trial and error and occasionally looking up individual words in a dictionary. But cut/copy/paste, I couldn’t figure out what those menu options were for. So when I read about it in the book, it was like “omg omg omg” and I tried it out, and I was so happy because now it was so much less tedious to have repeating things like drum patterns. Still remember that moment of joy, I literally thanked the book :')

As for fiction books, the most memorable is LotR, but that was much later, as a young adult. A pretty standard pick, I know…

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The best solution right now may be “buy a Macbook and learn MacOS”, which is so depressing.

Depends on whether you include “my personal data is sent to the manufacturer of the computer against my wishes” in your threat model… Apple does many good things for security, and I wish PC hardware makers would take security-related things even just nearly as seriously as them. But I can’t trust Apple anymore either.

(Explanation: the whole iCloud syncing stuff is such a buggy mess. I don’t want it, I don’t need it, so I want it off. But I guess Apple just doesn’t test enough how well it works when you turn it off, maybe they can’t imagine someone not wanting it. The problem is, iCloud sync settings don’t stay off. Settings randomly turn themselves back on, e.g. during OS updates, and upload data before you even notice it. I’m not claiming that’s intentional, I assume it’s just bugs. But I’ve observed such bugs again and again in the past 9 years, and I’ve had enough. Still have a Macbook around, but I use it very rarely these days, only when I need some piece of software on MacOS that has no suitable Linux equivalent.)

While a PC+Linux setup can avoid the specific issue of “don’t randomly upload my data somewhere”, the setup of it all can be a mess, as you say. And then security is still limited by buggy hardware and BIOS/firmware that is frequently full of security holes. The state of computers is depressing indeed (in so many ways, security just being one of them)…

Is it too early to hope that this is the beginning of the end of the bubble?

Also, does someone know why broadcom was also hit so hard? Is it because they make various networking-related chips used in datacenter infrastructure?

And people believe this … why?

Maybe people believe that all the AI stuff is just magic [insert sparkle emoji], and that can terminate further thought…

Edit: heh, turns out there’s science about that notion

screaming about “theft!” and “hacking!!”

Sounds plausible. Or maybe they will go with a don’t use it, because privacy! take. Funny thing is, I actually agree people shouldn’t give them their data. But they shouldn’t give it to OpenAI either…

Wow, that’s awesome!

I often think about the many devices I own with closed firmware in them, and the many amazing things these devices could be used for if they were more open and documented. Consider the amazing things people accomplish on old 80s/90s home computers and games consoles, often going way beyond what was thought possible with it at the time… the same could be done with so many other devices. Of course, people already do such hacking - like this example in the blog post. But the barrier for that would be so much lower if it didn’t require elaborate reverse engineering (how do people find the time and energy for that…). I have a little collection of 90s synth modules, I would love to modify their firmware, if it was available.

Sometimes I wish there was a law that forced companies to open up datasheets/internal documentation/etc. for a product when they stop making it… But yeah, can’t have that, of course.

I had to read “Uber for AI code data” so now you do too.

Wow, what a fractal of cursed meaning. I don’t even understand what it really means, but it feels like understanding it any further would cause considerable psychic damage.

This shows the US is falling behind China, so you gotta give OpenAI more money!

Fear of a “bullshit gap”, I guess.

Oh, and: simply perfect choice of header image on that article.

As a fan of physical media, I recently bought another drive as a spare, currently is IMO a good time for that. They still make really good drives in large enough quantities so they’re cheap, but that could end any time. Once production stops, they will vanish silently. Learned that lesson back then when floppy drives were suddendly gone… kinda wish I had stocked up a few new ones (for retro computing purposes) when they were still available.

Sooner or later the only remaining source of reliable digital information will be 1990s multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedias.

various topics (e.g., AI news, crypto, fitness, personal finance)

That sure is a specifc selection of topics.

Thank you!

Same. They’ve been a staple in my RSS feed list for so long (and they are one of the few sites where the RSS feed isn’t just the headlines). But recently I’ve been thinking several times already about throwing them out.

“Shortly after 2027” is a fun phrasing. Means “not before 2028”, but mentioning “2027” so it doesn’t seem so far away.

I interpret it as “please bro, keep the bubble going bro, just 3 more years bro, this time for real bro”

PSA: the domain shown in a google search result is not necessarily the domain it will actually link you to.

Maybe this is common knowledge, but I had no idea before. What an absolutely horrible decision from google to allow this. What are they thinking?? This is great for phishing and malware, but I don’t know what else. (Yeah ok, the reason has probably something to do with “line must go up”.)

So much wrong with this…

In a way, it reminds me of the wave of entirely fixed/premade loop-based music making tools from years ago. Where you just drag and drop a number of pre-made loops from a library onto some tracks, and then the software automatically makes them fit together musically and that’s it, no further skill or effort required. I always found that fun to play around with for an evening or two, but then it quickly got boring. Because the more you optimize away the creative process, the less interesting it becomes.

Now the AI bros have made it even more streamlined, which means it’s even more boring. Great. Also, they appear to think that they are the first people to ever have the idea “let’s make music making simple”. Not surprising they believe that, because a fundamental tech bro belief is that history is never interesting and can never teach anything, so they never even look at it.

Ah, so Google Search runs on UDP, interesting, that must be why it’s so unreliable now.

Thanks for the heads-up. I couldn’t finish reading through all postings in that forum thread, it’s all just making me so tired… always the same shit.

It is very disturbing and scary.

They’re explicitly carving out an exception to target sexual/gender minorities. And I wonder, given how they are often among the first groups being targeted, and then other groups follow, how long until they add more exceptions? How long until Meta modifies the rules further to e.g. explicitly allow racism too?

Meta/Facebook has never been a good company. But the path they have actively chosen now is so much more evil than before.