I facepalmed when I read that last entry. I had a G-Shock watch for a long time, it was a great watch, I have a lot of sentimentality towards it, but I do not see any reason why anyone would want an NFT for it.
I agree it is all a bit stupid, But I am feeling charitable this morning so I will give it a go.
If you wanted to create a registry of watch ownership a nft is certainly one way to go about it. and this use makes far more sense than most tokens. running on nothing more than a dream.
Really I think it is more that companies need to maintain a corp of engineers, these engineers are needed for key important projects, but a stable company is not in panic "put out the fire" mode all the time. so there is room for more speculative projects. and this is probably one of them.
Most of the world is powered by Unix (and its clones/derivatives), at least in the infrastructure space, with a small percent still running Windows Server for some masochistic reason. Outside of playing with OpenVMS exactly one time with qemu (purely because I kind of liked their goofy shark logo [1]), I've never used anything from DEC, but throughout the 80s my understanding is that DEC was a force to be reckoned with. I think there was probably more diversity in operating systems back then.
The DEC stuff was huge for a period of time, and I feel like there's an alternate universe where VMS and VAX stayed the standard, and Unix is the footnote. I'm not sure that universe would be better, there's probably a reason that Unix won overall, but it's not like DEC and VAX were tiny things.
Yeah, I looked it up after you mentioned it. Interesting stuff.
I hate Windows but that's not so much the kernel but much more due to my hatred of the interface and Windows Update, so I don't know if the alternate universe where DEC reigned supreme would be better or worse.
I had a bunch of DEC Alpha's 21164 back in the late 90's I absolutely loved those machines except from the ARC/SRM firmware which was pretty horrible. We also had a Sparc64 board/CPU from Sun Microelectronics which we put in our tower case, added SCSI, video cards etc and ran Solaris. I also worked for a 3rd-party Sun clone maker around that time, we had piles of Sparc/Sparc64 boards sitting round.
UNIX probably won out due to licensing and the fact that it was available on x86-64 so much earlier - mainly Linux and BSD I guess but Solaris was there as well, VMS didn't boot on x86-64 until 2019.
Everyone loved the Alpha machines when they came out as far as I remember. I also liked Digital Unix a lot more than Solaris or HP-UX though I don't remember any particular reason, probably completely irrational :)
I know a lot of devs hate on Perforce (and I am no exception), but I've grown to actually really like p4merge (the Perforce merge tool) for handling conflicts.
It's a bit of an odd one, and it has a bit of a learning curve, but it's free (as in beer), relatively easy to install, and seems to work well for me. I haven't found a FOSS tool that I like as much yet.
I don't think I've actually used Kdiff3. I always assumed that it was Linux only but apparently I was objectively wrong about that. I should give it a shot.
Even if he didn't kill himself and even if it was an accident, he still was very much fucked over by the British government. They stripped his security clearance and made him a felon and made him take female hormones. This guy cracked the uncrackable code and basically (co)invented Computer Science, but all they cared about who he had sex with.
I mean, I think the answer to this is the very simple: they think it will lead to more money.
I'm sure someone in a board meeting saw something about GrapheneOS and LineageOS and Cyanogen and feels like if they de-open Android, some (or most) of those users will move to vanilla Android, and that will lead to profits.
I'm not saying that they're right about this; I think ultimately very few (if any) people actually know how to run businesses and it's all about giving an appearance of maximizing profitability, and as long as it leads to a potential short term stock boost then these executives get their huge bonuses and they can just blame the next guy when things break.
This isn't really theoretical; look at how Jack Welch took one of the most respected companies in the world, more or less integrated ponzinomics to temporarily bump the stock prices, and 20+ years later GE is kind of a joke and isn't even on the S&P500 anymore.
I don't have exact numbers, but I'm sure Graphene, Lineage, and all of the mods combined are much less than 1% of all android users; as well as these customers being less profitable than average as a marketing target.
The phone was the end of open computing, the tech companies obtained an iron grip on the platform, this time with fully accepted total monitoring and data collection down to everything you say, hear, everywhere you go, and with smartwatch biosensors, everything you feel. The only thing left is to get smart glasses and they will know everything you see. Smell they can probably interpolate.
It happened over a decade ago, and that might as well be 100 years ago in modern attention spans. All the governments have to do is pay the companies money, or simply force-legislate, or threaten under the table for all that info, and for permanent forever access to active tracking and monitoring.
AI provides all the analysis they need to watch the firehose. It's all there.
At this point it doesn't matter if an alternative comes. It'll be such the minority, that the social graph will fill all the holes. And they can simply track your IMEI regardless from the towers, listen in with other nearby microphones/phones. There is no escape.
All that remains is for the key to be turned for worse-than-1984 authoritarianism. It's right there, ready for the AI-empowered 50% of consumption controlled, 90% of stocks owned oligarchy to use.
Open computing still exists. It's just overshadowed by the prevalence of locked mobile devices because those are convenient and good enough for the vast majority, who would rather use those than a less convenient desktop, laptop, or even raspberrypi.
Surveillance on the internet is challenging to avoid, but internet surveillance and tracking doesn't extend to (outside-of-browser) local compute.
I don't dispute that at all. I don't think it matters, it just needs to look like they're doing something to avoid forks and the like.
That said, there might be stuff that's actually using open source Android for profit. For example, the Nook Glowlight Plus, which runs a modded version of Android, doesn't appear to have any direct or even indirect references to Android anywhere (and I had to contribute a bit to the discourse to even get the rooting to work [1]). I have no ideas about the inner dealings of Barnes and Noble, but it wouldn't surprise me if they're running a completely forked version of FOSS Android and aren't paying a dime to Google for it.
I suspect these are the things that Google is trying to crack down on.
You're being downvoted but I think I get what you're getting at.
When I was doing my masters a few months ago, I would get my assignments rejected whenever I didn't run them through Grammarly first.
I have nothing against Grammarly, it's a useful too, but I find that it has the tendency to reject things that (as far as I can tell) are still technically correct but don't have the "AI vibe" to it. I suspect that the graders are running things through Grammarly themselves and rejecting anything that it rejects. This is probably going to become increasingly more common as time goes on.
It's hardly the worst thing in the world, but I do think it will lead to the only "accepted" writing being extremely plain and formulaic.
Somehow the Republicans have managed to convince their constituents that somehow stuff that will objectively fuck them over is actually not fucking them over. It's impressive in its own way.
I have seen people who still don't seem to understand the (extremely) simple "there's no such thing as a free lunch" part of economics and genuinely still think that the tariffs are going to be paid purely by China, because apparently they don't realize that for-profit businesses bake all overhead (including taxes and tariffs) into the total cost. It really isn't that complicated, but I guess the distortion field around "owning the left" makes them turn off this logic.
Wouldn't private planes still necessitate air traffic controllers? I remember when I flew with my uncle in his small private plane [1] he had to fairly frequently chatter with the air traffic people over the radio to report his position and altitude and the like.
[1] Just a tiny two seat thing, I don't come from billionaires, it wasn't a cool private jet.
I recently have gotten into the "drag and drop" forms of programming like Node-RED and n8n.
Obviously, anyone here who has read my posts knows I know how to write code, but having a bunch of built in connectors that are agnostic to each other with the Oauth and the like being somewhat plug and play allows me to iterate on some ideas a lot quicker.
I installed an n8n instance on my server, and have become kind of addicted to making different Discord bots, and I'm having more fun with this than I thought I would. 95% of the stuff on there is basically drag and drop, and when I need more elaborate logic then I can easily drop into JavaScript. I am looking into writing new nodes for different services, and I keep having new ideas for different stuff I want to build.
reply