Me too, on the VIC-20.

It just had to turn it upside down!

I think something like the Commodore PET might qualify. Back in the day, I saw it used for everything from cash registers to accountants’ workstations, but rarely for anything else.

I think that the original IBM PC was conceived and marketed as a business machine and only grew beyond that because of Microsoft’s deep commitment to it as a platform and IBM’s uncharacteristicly open specifications and design.

If not for that combination, the PC might never have left the office and most of us would have stuck with the companies who were actually breaking new ground, Apple and Commodore.

Florida House Bill 1 would prohibit children under the age of 16 from using most social media platforms, regardless of parental approval.

The social media platforms the bill would target include any site that tracks user activity, allows children to upload content or uses addictive features designed to cause compulsive use.

How would this even work? Let’s take a closer look at the first 2 clauses of the second paragraph:

A student portal for accessing lessons and submitting assignments would require tracking activity and uploading content. If that system is accessible to students or anyone else from anywhere other than direct connection to the school LAN, then it would be in contravention of this law.

Or let’s say someone puts up a self-hosted, restricted-access system for extended family to stay in touch without using a commercial or public system (something I’m in the process of doing). Allowing teenagers to use that site would put them on the wrong side of the law.

Brain damaged authoritarian nut jobs…

That doesn’t surprise me. I have Haiku running in a VM, but haven’t looked at it in 2 years, despite the fact I used BeOS as a daily driver back in the day.

Well, if you want “compile something unstable yourself,” here is their official documentation for ARM64.

And here is someone’s progress report on porting to RISC-V. They seem to have started in 2021, so maybe they were successful.

There used to be a CBC Radio program called “I Hear Music”. The host discussed and demonstrated the histories of various genres and their interconnections.

One of the standout episodes for me was the relationship between operatic forms, especially Wagnerian, and certain heavy metal forms. At the time, the community band I was playing in was rehearsing something by Wagner and I was having the same problem I always had with Wagner: I couldn’t find the music. I knew it was there because the music is always there, but I just couldn’t find it. And unlike previous exposure to playing Wagner, I couldn’t get away with just being technically correct with “buried” parts because I had a quite exposed passage that had to be music, not just notes in the right places.

I had enjoyed the stuff in my son’s metal collection, so after listening to that episode, I went back to that collection with new ears. What I learned there helped me find not just the music in the piece we were rehearsing, but all the other Wagner I hadn’t understood and more besides.

When I was looking at 3D printers, my wife asked me if I thought I could make money with it. I said “not in a million years.” She asked me what I was waiting for, then. Two weeks later I was printing the test model! Sadly, I’ve made basically no progress with “real” CAD, so I do everything in TinkerCAD.

Fine woods and metals are crazy expensive, but if you keep your eyes open and aren’t afraid to ask, a lot of pretty nice stuff is available for free or close to it as long as you’re willing to put the time in on reclamation. I just got a nice Schubert chokecherry log for helping take it down and clean up. I got some sheet steel and light duty tubing from some discarded BBQs. And I’ve got more poplar than I know what to do with. Poplar is the go to tree for yards around here and there is hardly a week that goes by without someone taking down an old tree.

my hobby is finding new hobbies

Sounds a bit like me. I just retired in June and am busy setting up my workshop. The original intention was woodworking with a focus on boatbuilding. As I go, I realize that I’m actually headed more in the direction of hobby manufacturing: a variety of stuff in wood and metal with a side order of 3D printing. On top of rebooting my programming hobby of learning a new language every year from before I “sold out” to Visual Basic and Access.

Don’t sweat it. I used to feel the same way. Then, somewhere in my 50s, I realized that I actually had already been doing what I wanted: everything. “Jack of all trades, master of none”.

I did strive toward mastery of most things I tried that I liked enough to stick with for awhile. I like to think that I generally achieved competency, but I know that I had a few bosses and coworkers who would dispute that. :)

Learning new things and having new experiences is priceless. If you can find that within a particular career, that’s fantastic, but it’s not the only approach.

Check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks

I’m not the OP, but I’ll take a stab at it.

Amazon is being sued for abusing their market dominance.

Whether they are into the “smart toilet” business or not, let’s pretend they are and that they effectively control that market.

So then the “flaw” in the lawsuit is that all the toilets just stop working during the court proceedings and maybe beyond. That makes life more than a bit challenging for the prosecutors, regulators, judges, and society as a whole, giving Amazon undue influence, not just in the market, but in the courtroom itself.

This is relevant because Amazon is already meeting with some success in making their trial into a private trial. Some feel that this is undermining the concept of open courts and maybe the proceedings themselves. (As a Canadian, I don’t have a proper understanding of American courts, but it seems very strange that the OJ Simpson trial was televised, but Amazon and Google seem to be getting publication bans and camera removals.)

Feel free to laugh now, I guess.

To answer the question a bit more directly, I would guess that demographics here skew a bit older than elsewhere. That is just a guess, based on the fact that sdf.org dates back to 1987.

Two big ones. I bought the VIC-20 shortly after introduction when I was 21.

Big memory 1: writing machine language programs without the aid of an assembler. I couldn’t afford the assembler cartridge, but I wanted to break out of the BASIC sandbox.

Big memory 2: finding a military surplus acoustic coupler modem and using the schematics to make my own connector, then writing a terminal program so I could dial in to these crazy things called BBSs.

Are you sure that rounding was broken? Many systems use “Gaussian” or “banker’s” rounding to reduce accumulation of rounding errors. Instead of always rounding to the next larger absolute value at .5, they round to the nearest even number. Although it introduces a bias toward even numbers in the result set, it reduces accumulation of error when .5 is as likely as as any other fraction and odd/even are equally likely in the source.

I was taught “banker’s” rounding in school (graduated 1974) and have had to implement it a few times to reduce error accumulation.

If you are looking for a rabbit hole, Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive article, including an example of how the wrong choice of rounding algorithm led to massive problems at the Vancouver Stock Exchange (Canada).

For anyone not sure what this is all about, CBC has a pretty good podcast covering the descent into medieval nonsense.

I had relatives living just a few miles away in one of the hotspots.

Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve been using Signal since the TextSecure days. In all that time, I’ve been able to move very few people off of whatever came pre-installed.

I looked at Wire when it came out and decided that any gains were not worth the hassle of getting people to move. The fundamentals of switching costs haven’t changed. That is why so many people who rail against Facebook and Twitter still use them.

You’re probably aware of this, but apart from the very real problems associated with centralization on massive services and their desire to create walled gardens, a lot (most?) of the problems you list for email can be traced back to the problems of spam.

Spam makes up the massive bulk of email and most of it is automated and distributed by botnets. Without a lot of the things you list, spam would make email even less useful than it is.

I was once on the front lines of spam management. At the time, I calculated that spam and malware made up 70% - 80% of our company’s incoming email. That was 15 years ago. I can’t imagine things have got better or easier to manage.

And you’re not alone. I know a lot of people who have email only for account management. They monitor their email during registration, add the relevant domain to the allow list, and send everything else to spam. Then they set their spam folder to auto delete anything older than about a month old.

Email is, for all intents and purposes, dead for general purpose communications.

Lol. That’s never going to happen. Most of the people I communicate with can barely wrap their heads around the fact that SMS doesn’t require “WiFi” (their name for internet).

For myself, I’ve looked at some of the other systems, but decided that there’s no point since I’d be alone. :)

Yeah, I think pagers are probably only useful for first responders and the like in remote areas. My pager would work even when our radios wouldn’t, but one way isn’t all that useful for most purposes.