I have a 10-year-old LG TV that runs webOS 3. The first update slowed it down - not that it was particularly fast to begin with - and every subsequent update made it even slower.
It also constantly nags you to update the firmware. You can’t just refuse once; every time you turn on the TV, it asks you again.
I won’t make the same mistake the next time I go shopping for a TV.
Forgot to mention - there were no improvements whatsoever in terms of functionality.
It was possible to connect the MIC or EAR connector (I don't remember exactly which one, as this was 40 years ago) to a cassette recorder and start recording, which caused the cassette recorder to amplify the Spectrum's sound.
And when I'm mentioning cassette recorder - I had a neighbour in my building who also had a Spectrum and whose window was some 12 meters away from my window and once we connected our computer with audio cables (MIC to EAR and vice versa) so one types some short program (or just REM message) and enters SAVE while the other one enters LOAD and gets the message.
Our networking adventure started bad as it turned out that cable had large signal loss so it seemed that this brilliant idea failed but then we connected cassette recorders between computers that hugely amplified signal and thing actually worked.
Experiment ended when a party-line neighbor started complaining that his phone line was unusable for hours - we used phones as yelling through the window while trying to synchronize wasn't producing satisfactory results.
The dream of perpetual labor machine is something capitalists are willing to destroy the planet in order to chase their fictitious dream. Oppressors must be stopped.
There was a reason why the phrase "perpetual" was used, to invoked how unrealistic perpetual energy machines are and how futile it is for the human race to chase such dreams.
How many tens of trillions of capital have been incinerated in reducing the quality of life for workers compared to actually uplifting them?
Sure, you'll need energy inputs, you're not going to beat thermodynamics. But we're not capturing even 0.01% of available energy yet, there's a lot of room to grow.
Industrial capitalism has been fantastic for quality of life. Here I am sitting in an air-conditioned office browsing HN during a workday, instead of slaving away in the fields as a peasant farmer. I'll take more automation please.
I was wondering the other day why we didn't put this level of effort into building a highway across the Atlantic and the Pacific. It seems to me if we just piled bricks made with all the money dumped into AI in the ocean, we could easily have done this. Likewise we could have just build a canal across the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific. These efforts would have drastically reduced shipping costs and risks but they look impossible (and stupid) on paper so no one tried them.
Why is AI different?
Because it happens in a computer and many people think that makes something easy, like CGI or computer hacking in movies. It's intangible magic and belief is the product sold to investors.
IIRC, my problem with Quake multiplayer was that one node acted as the server, so when I connected to a friend’s computer via modem, my lag was a serious disadvantage (neither my friend nor I ever won as clients). Doom, on the other hand, simply froze both computers whenever there was a communication issue.
Although, to be fair, we played Doom over an RS-232 cable - hauling a PC across the city every weekend was a testament to our love for the game :)
> If one spouse stays home to watch them, that covers as many kids as you have.
That's debatable ;)
I have two kids, and taking care of both during the day is vastly harder - both mentally and physically - than working two jobs. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child, and I don't think many people have that village anymore. As a result, a lot of kids are being raised by TV or the internet, and if you don't want that, you'll find yourself occupied with them almost 100% of the time.
Another issue is that the spouse who stays home can effectively kiss their career goodbye if they spend seven or eight years out of the workforce. Given current divorce rates, that's not a trivial risk.
I wish I had grandparents living nearby, but that's not the case either.
I'm not saying it's impossible - I have two children myself and would probably have had more if I'd started earlier - but it's not easy. And, judging from my admittedly small sample size, it seems to be getting harder.
This varies majorly by child, parent/caretaker, and environment. For instance with my children if we go outside, then they are on full auto mode. They could play in the yard by themselves pretty much all day long as long as at least one parent's nearby watching them. But if we're indoors then they demand full attention. On the other hand somehow our nanny has got them to be able to happily play indoors while she mostly just chills out doing stuff on her phone or whatever - and I have no complaints since it works out great for everybody.
> It's an advantage, but I don't see that changing for a very long time:
It’s an interesting question: for how long will it remain important to know multiple languages in the age of LLMs? Of course, it’s better to know foreign language(s) — no doubt about that — but for day-to-day work, unless you’re living abroad, it seems that their practical utility will slowly decrease. And speech-to-speech translation will likely continue to improve as well.
Ah, Clipper was a major force in the late ’80s in Yugoslavia, as economic reforms enabled the widespread establishment of private companies that needed accounting software, and PCs became cheap enough for one-person shops to develop custom accounting solutions. It was the Wild West for a few years, with a zillion different applications, until some bigger players emerged.
IIRC, it needed one or two 360K floppies for a full install (a pirated copy; maybe the legal distribution was larger - at that time, all software was pirated). Compiling was fast (on a computer where you type dir and can read the filenames appearing on the screen faster than the computer can print them), but linking was slow, so everyone replaced MS Link with Borland’s TurboLink, which was an order of magnitude faster. It didn’t support overlays, but there were ways to work around that.
There was also documentation available in some third-party TSR app.
Later, another linker became popular: Blinker, which had a bunch of interesting features, such as loading overlays into EMS memory and providing various security functions to help protect your software. But by that time, the writing was already on the wall for DOS.
Funnily enough, many customers actually preferred DOS, since navigating with the keyboard was far faster than using a mouse, and Windows apps generally weren’t designed with keyboard navigation in mind.
Ah, Blinker! Never used it, but remeber the ads in magazines.
Same in Iberian penisula regarding software acquisition, even during university, the same copy centers for books, also offered catalogs of which software we would like to have, or street baazars even, only in the 2000's the goverment (in Portugal) actually started hunting down those practices.
A few years ago, I bought a bunch of magnetic cables (with both Lightning and USB-C connectors - the cables are the same; only the connectors differ). I haven’t had any issues so far.
Acquired taste. Ten years ago, I switched from a sugar-based soft drink to one with Aspartame - it didn’t taste great at first. Now the sugary one tastes awful, while the Aspartame one tastes great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Forgot to mention - there were no improvements whatsoever in terms of functionality.
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