Apparently we got our floppies for cheap because we just had a whole bunch of pirated floppies.

Admittedly, some did have multiple games on them. That’s what LOAD"$",8 was for.

LOAD"*",8,1

SEARCHING FOR *  
LOADING  
READY.  
RUN

I wouldn’t have gotten that far. That utter savage can’t even tell the difference between MT/s and MB/s.

Fair enough. The dumb ones were just loud enough to sound like 90%. But I sure did talk to some panicked dumbasses online back then.

I agree with the “nutcase” diagnosis but I think she just can’t tell paragliders and parachutes apart and thought these were paratroopers. Which Hamas somehow has now.

I remember the early 2000s when basically 90% of all Americans were absolutely certain that jihadists were going to attack their local supermarket any minute now because Power Cable, Nebraska was such a strategic target.

Heck, there was a bomb scare because of an advertisement campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force that involved placing PCBs with LEDs on them that would display characters from the show. Because surely Al Quaeda would put conspicuous LED displays on their bombs.

News media want people to panic so they keep tuning in. Panicked people tend to come up with remarkably stupid scenarios like “Al Quaeda have unlimited resources and can show up anywhere to shoot people at random” or “Hamas want to take Dorcester as a strategic location to strike at Israel from”.

Ever since the BE200 debacle I don’t know if I can trust Intel to deliver. Sure, the stuff that’s already out there works but who knows if any of their future stuff will?

AI usually got better when people realized it wasn’t going to do all it was hyped up for but was useful for a certain set of tasks.

Then it turned from world-changing hotness to super boring tech your washing machine uses to fine-tune its washing program.

Why not submit a million vibecoded PRs against various Microsoft repos? At some point they might get it.

Yes, I’ve literally seen baked goods advertised like that. One bakery in my town is proud of its bigger-than-average pretzels and puts the weight right there on the ad posters.

My vent core feels retroactively unblasted by this revelation. You really can’t expect anything good from any of the major studios anymore these days.

Nuclear power has some nice properties (and a whole bunch of terrible ones), is technologically interesting, and has been the premier low-CO₂ energy source for a while. That gets it some brownie points although I agree that it shouldn’t be sacrosanct.

I personally am mainly interested in using breeder reactors to breed high-level waste that needs to be kept safe for 100,000 years into even higher-level waste that only needs to be kept safe for 200 years. That’s expensive and dangerous but it doesn’t require unknown future technology in other to achieve safe storage for an order of magnitude longer than recorded history.

There’s a whole bunch of very good questions you can ask about that approach (such as how to handle the proliferation risk) but the idea of turning nuclear waste disposal into a feasibly solvable problem just appeals to me.

Of course I expect an extreme amount of oversight and no tolerance for fucking up. That may be crazy expensive but we’re talking about large-scale breeder deployment. It’s justified.

Mind you, Highlander II would’ve made more sense as a non-Highlander movie that just revolves around space aliens dealing with Earth having a planetary shield now. As a sequel to Highlander its premise was really weird.

Oh, please don’t take that remark as an excuse or endorsement. The intended tone is one of resignation – pseudonymity reduces the social cost of bad manners to near zero and there’s not much we can do about it.

I will forgive people for being blunt in their criticism, however. High-ranking politicians are exactly the people who have to be able to take a certain level of verbal abuse since their decisions can change other people’s lives in directions that justify the liberal use of expletives.

Which plays back into my perception that Fetterman is currently not suited to his role.

I can understand both sides here.

On the one hand I have empathy with him like with any victim of such a life-altering injury and wish him a swift and full recovery. I don’t want people to suffer and, quite frankly, “the brain doesn’t work right anymore” is one of my personal horror scenarios.

On the other hand this kind of behavior is a huge problem in someone capable of making decisions that can alter the lives of other people – millions of them, in this case. He has enough power to ruin a lot of people’s lives, intentionally or not.

Even as someone who isn’t impacted by his mental fitness in any way, I’d agree that removing him from office seems like a good move. That man needs rest, not the stress of a high-profile political office during interesting times. And his state needs someone with a level head, which doesn’t mesh well with a semi-recent traumatic brain injury.

And, well, this is a politics community so guess which part the discussion will focus on. (Also, this is online so people are inclined to be assholes.)

That’s not quite how AC outlets work. Line and neutral can intentionally have different potentials relative to ground depending on how the house’s electrical system is designed. This can become relevant in certain situations like very simple devices (think “lamp socket with a power plug”).

A plug that can’t be inverted makes this a non-issue.

(Edit: Added missing “not”.)

I think the Swiss have the best Europlug-based system. Their three-conductor plugs have the same footprint as basic Europlugs, which makes for very dense plug arrangements. Unlike e.g. the German Schuko plug they only fit in one orientation so you get no polarity issues.

It’s pretty neat.

Well, the camera needs to talk to your onsite storage in order to store video. A simple consumer device like a Ring isn’t going to be hardwired; it just uses Wi-Fi (which every household can be assumed to have) to connect to your LAN and talk to the storage device.

The question is why the Wi-Fi could be turned off on the first place. Probably an ISP-managed router; I doubt they’d go and jam the entire spectrum between 2.4 and 7 GHz.

That’s one reason why people should use their own router and/or access point whenever possible.

We’ve been productively using AI for decades now – just not the AI you think of when you hear the term. Fuzzy logic, expert systems, basic automatic translation… Those are all things that were researched as artificial intelligence. We’ve been using neural nets (aka the current hotness) to recognize hand-written zip codes since the 90s.

Of course that’s an expert definition of artificial intelligence. You might expect something different. But saying that AI isn’t AI unless it’s sentient is like saying that space travel doesn’t count if it doesn’t go faster than light. It’d be cool if we had that but the steps we’re actually taking are significant.

Even if the current wave of AI is massively overhyped, as usual.