“I like to rebuild my kit sports car every time I want to take it out for a drive. Anyone who does otherwise is a pleb.”

I still think they should have bumped the version to 26. They have a yearly release schedule for version bumps, at least two other major pieces of software have already done this and it would have skipped any potential confusion with Windows 11.

“If I find out you’ve been watching AI slop, there will be consequences. And don’t think hiding it from me will make sure I don’t find out. Watching slop makes people stupid in a very particular way, and you can’t stop yourself from catching stupid from it, so I’ll be able to tell.”

It’s up to you what “consequences” means in this instance. You could even reveal that the consequence was the stupidity they developed along the way, and now they have to live with that.

(By all means, modify this message to be less cold and more kind and loving. I am not good at that sort of thing.)

That first tale is clearly a case of when tech aura goes bad.

I mean, we like to let the non-techs believe that our mere presence can cause technology to behave, and we might even like to believe that ourselves, but that comes back to bite us if the hardware breaks instead.

… I’m not saying the tech should have grabbed something heavy and made a show of threatening the device, but I don’t think it would have hurt!

Non-uniformed police that don’t identify are not police.

As such you can call (uniformed) police on them.

If they say they know that ICE are operating in that area, ask how you can know that the people you’re reporting are actually ICE and not impostors that turned up after the real ICE left.

The plural of “axis” is “axes”, pronounced “AX-ease”.

Where are their communications? Who visits a government website without needing to?

To me it makes sense that they should cover as much ground as possible and have accounts on all major platforms as well as making announcements on TV and radio.

And in order to do so they should have their own accounts on there in order that their message gets across directly without having to go through a third party that has an account on there.

Now, when that site starts espousing “free speech” of the sort that only they like, then it might be a good idea to not use that particular platform any more, because that brings in the third party interference that wasn’t there in the first place, even if the site was technically third party.

But hey whatever, now let’s make, say, the BBC the mouthpiece of the government - it’s not like the Tories didn’t try really hard to do that when they were in power - and have everyone report on that. Far better.

Government creates announcement feed. No-one knows about it because they can only advertise it on their own announcement feed.

What now?

Terry Davis tried to do for the PC with TempleOS what the C64’s BASIC and KERNAL did for its hardware.

Terry was all the more a mad lad because he didn’t get to create the hardware spec he was working with.

Could you imagine someone doing the same as Commodore did but starting with 64-bit era hardware?

Taking it another direction, there are free and paid “easy programming” platforms that provide a sandbox not unlike a modern version of what it was like to program a C64.

At a pinch, DOSBox and a copy of QBASIC might suffice.

The 64GS was one of Commodore’s last gasps at trying to make some money using the 8-bit parts they still had left in stock. The whole thing was a disaster.

It wasn’t based on the C64. It was a C64. Without a keyboard and some of the other ports missing. A fact that came to bite anyone who tried a C64 cartridge game that needed keyboard input.

And IIRC one of the games that came bundled with it was a game like that.

They were at least smart enough to have the BASIC startup pointer (the one that otherwise caused READY. to appear) in the ROM patched to go to a neat little graphic telling people to turn it off, plug in a game and turn it back on again.

What Commodore saved by releasing the GS, the customer ultimately paid by needing to buy games in a format more expensive than disk or tape that would run on a regular C64.

… and given the time period, lots of people were buying PCs and offloading their regular C64 hardware and a ton of games for the price of the GS and its handful of games. And that C64 would run any GS game that was likely to come out.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

It may not be a public place per se, but it is a place where a very large cohort of the general public go.

Perhaps my analogy should have been “This is bit like saying that governments shouldn’t make announcements on television and radio stations not under government control.”

The same logic applies there. Of course they should. A large cohort of the general public watch television and listen to the radio (less so these days in the age of the Internet, but people do still watch and listen there.).

This is a bit like saying that governments shouldn’t post notices in public places.

I get anxious if I have more than three open per window. How other people don’t is incomprehensible to me.

My phone is an ancient flip-phone, so I can’t be sure how things would go there, but I can’t imagine it would be much different.

It’s touching a highly sensitive part of your anatomy to part of another being. This proves that you trust them.

The touch is gentle. This proves that you are to be trusted.

Both contracts are those of mutual safety.

There are multiple types of kissing. There’s the kiss, perhaps on the head, that you might give a pet or a young relative.

And there the other sorts of kisses that would be incredibly inappropriate in those instances because it breaks part of the contract of trust.

But if between consenting individuals who trust each other in other ways, then all is well.

Where is this woman from? I don’t think the galactic economy has recovered enough for the Magratheans to have been awoken again.

Surely you’re not saying they shouldn’t have had a Twitter presence?

Or is this more of a “they should have left when Elon took over” kind of thing? In which case, they probably thought that the majority of people who follow(ed) them on there wouldn’t have left immediately - not least because there weren’t any good alternatives* at the time - so it would have made sense to maintain a presence, which I think is what’s actually going on.

* Yes, Mastodon existed, but you’ve got to think about the average person here. There’s a reason the first people on there were academics and tech folks.

Based on the actions of my own government, the correct behaviour is to appease, play nice and hope he uses lube when he ultimately comes to f–k us.

Copilot copilotted your Copilot. Something something marklar.

We lived through the Cold War in the '80s. It seemed like a very real threat and eventually even though nothing really changed until the wall came down, everyone kind of got used to it and went on as best we could.

Like we have more recently with Covid. That’s still there and hasn’t gone away. It’s still as serious a threat as it was at the beginning. You know how you’d mostly forgotten about it but not really? Same deal.

If you can’t form or find a community, find distractions.

And if you find out where the first bomb’s going to hit, let me know because I want to be under it.

Well duh. All possible questions have already been asked. There’s no need to ask any more. The world never changes and old answers never go out of date, so that’s it. StackOverflow is now the sum total of human knowledge for computer science and programming and will be so for ever more.