It’ll only affect 32bit systems with ancient operating systems storing dates in epoch time.

Not a small number. But nowhere remotely near what Y2K could have been.

Hopefully by the time we need to account for a 64bit rollover, I’ll be comfortably retired. But by that time, proton decay may be a more worrisome problem.

I imagine there are fan groups for Our Flag Means Death.

The term, “enshitification” is getting bandied about a lot. But the bots and corporations are an inevitable part of capitalism. Make money at all costs, never be satisfied with what you have, and treat everybody that isn’t you like a stepping stone.

Scammers and sociopathic c-levels are missing something fundamentally human. A complete lack of empathy. But this has always been a part of our species. The difference now is that we have a system that dramatically rewards that sickness. And that’s not even getting into how being able to be evil at scale is going to make the next few decades interesting.

My argument is thus:

LLMs are decent at boilerplate. They’re good at rephrasing things so that they’re easier to understand. I had a student who struggled for months to wrap her head around how pointers work, two hours with GPT and the ability to ask clarifying questions and now she’s rockin’.

I like being able to plop in a chunk of Python and say, “type annotate this for me and none of your sarcasm this time!”

But if you’re using an LLM as a problem solver and not as an accelerator, you’re going to lack some of the deep understanding of what happens when your code runs.

I think that it’s absolutely fair to jump on Microsoft for this.

There is nothing wrong with this hardware. RAM and CPU clock speed plateaued a long time ago. The overwhelming majority of these systems being thrown away would run Linux flawlessly.

Microsoft has never given a damn about security before. These new security “features” do more to lock people in than they do to keep them safe.

I stopped caring several years ago.

It’s like when Disney bought Star Wars. They homogenized it to make it more palatable and ended up making it dull and unappetizing. Neither franchise has a soul anymore. Just a formulaic plot with a set of waypoints in a dull 3 act format. Sprinkle in some in-humor, pedestrian jokes, and a special effects budget that would make the Pentagon blush and you have a recipe for dull tripe.

My off the cuff thought is that it may be used to change the content on the tags. Show it a specific QR code and it updates the content.

They cynical side of wants to believe that it’s being used to gather shopping analytics and correlate it to facial data.

Same!

I’m an atheist. But I’d be willing to listen to any door to door Jesus salesman who talked about the salvation of bigfoots.

An America-centric one. I’ve stopped tipping altogether. When the credit card reader at my grocery store deli suggested 15% I snapped.

I’m doing my part!

64Tib from the Tumblr and Reddit pornageddon. Most was legitimate cultural archiving, but a lot of other stuff got caught up as well.

Base 60 was good enough the Babylonians and it’s good enough for me!

From a human experience standpoint, Fahrenheit is more meaningful than Celsius.

0°F - Too damned cold 100°F - too damned hot

0°C - Jacket weather 100°C - He ded

And this hits another topic…

Emotional expression is culturally derived.

A raised eyebrow can mean very different things to different groups. Giving a thumbs up in Turkey or an okay sign in northern Africa will have radically different messages.

I seriously hate emojis.

They tell me nothing except that the sender is too lazy to give me a hint.

«Me plugging my ears as I walk by crazy right wing protestors»

“Ahhh! You’re not listening to me! You’re not respecting my freedom of speech! And if you tell your friends that I’m an asshole and to avoid my ramblings, then you hate free speech!”

People in my neighborhood put their Christmas lights up immediately after Halloween and might take them down before February.

Now I’m no mathetologist, but that’s 1/4 of the goddamned year! It’s not Christmas. It’s sad nostalgia for an aging generation, trying to recreate their own half remembered childhoods, and, like everything else in modern life, late stage capitalism is more than happy to take advantage and milk it for all that it’s worth.

On a serious note, doesn’t having a holiday season take up 1/4 of the year detract from its specialness and solemnity?

Zep had a few good albums. Jethro Tull. David Bowie. Pink Floyd.

But there are also a finite number of times you can listen to the same album before you start craving new stuff.

Ordered the iFleshlight. Looking forward to seeing the jealous looks I get at the coffee shop.

PTSD…

I once destroyed a CRT monitor by misconfiguring X11.

Nowadays Linux just works to the point where my 72 year old mother is able to deal with Pop_OS without issue.

But man, those early days of unstable drivers, slow dial-up internet, and navigating through Usenet and IRC for decent support was a nightmarish labor of love.

The silky smoothness that we have now was built on caffeine and the backs of millions of greybeards.

(For the record: “Greybeard” is a nerdy term of endearment that I’ve seen adopted by people identifying all across the rainbow. Kinda like dwarfs on Discworld).

Jellyfin is a great and superior alternative.

In an epic team up with Joss Whedon!