Are there any actual Tarheels in any office in the state?

Oh great, .ml and hexbear are getting mroe members.

Idiocrat

There’s a Youtube channel called Ben Eater that does a great job of explaining computing from first principles. He built a computer out of discrete components on breadboards. He also has a great series where he wires up a 6502 microprocessor and basically builds a little 8-bit microcomputer around it, again on breadboards, in a way that you’ll get. He sells them as kits, so you can play at home if you want. They’re also just nice educational evening calm time viewing.

“Work” computers will often have legacy ports because maybe you need it to connect to some old printer.

There are a lot of places still using old-style dot matrix printers or other weird old hardware. Point-of-sale systems made to this day often come with a bunch of serial, or not quite serial, ports.

Look, I’d like to see that little shit do better.

Well that’s nice of them.

You think they licensed that from…it would be Disney now?

Homestaw Wunnew.

No lemons, on melon.

Too bad I hid a boot.

Lisa Bonet ate no basil.

War sir is raw.

Was it a car, or a cat I saw?

LLMs like Gemini have basically the exact same UI form factor as the Starship Enterprise’s computer. All you need is that little tweedle “I’m listening” prompt and a Text-To-Majel-Barrett library. Thing is, on the Enterprise, it always correctly worked. If you asked it for a statement of fact you’d get a quote out of a database. Gemini will just make shit up that sounds plausible.

The all-new Ikea Cjardboord.

Which is why I was fine with Google’s usual take, there’s a switch in the options you have to turn off to allow installing software from outside the Play store. Keeps the normies on the rails, anyone who pushes the “I’ll take my chances” button is assuming personal responsibility.

Meanwhile: spoofing telephone numbers. We don’t have the same problem with, say, email, do we? We basically need to tear out the telephone system and replace it with something that works in the modern era, quit barely emulating the form factor of a century old system that basically doesn’t exist anymore.

You can’t say the phone companies should block calls from unverified numbers while at the same time saying Google shouldn’t block download of unverified apps.

Sure you can. There’s a difference: Whether or not the owner of the handset requested the traffic.

A random APK from F-Droid isn’t going to suddenly demand my attention while my phone is sitting on my desk with the screen off. An Indian man threatening to jail me if I don’t mail him Amazon gift cards has and will again.

You’re not going to find an Obama Hope edition firearm out there.

What’s Merrell?

I once named the disease “The Disease From Madagascar” and it started in Madagascar.

I also killed the world with a bacteria called Red Ass.

I’ll accept that out of an alarm app. An alarm app gets to say “Look I straight-up need push notifications to work.”

Maaaaaaaaybe a messaging app. Signal gets to send push notifications.

Ugh, my dumbass boomer father.

Okay. 1. My father goes by his middle name. Let’s pretend his name is Christopher James Smith. He introduces himself as Jim. For my entire life, it’s been easy to screen calls for him because “Hello, may I speak to…Christopher Smith please?” That’s spam. “Hey is Jim there?” That’s someone who knows him.

2. The dumbass answer the phone “Hello, this is Jim?”

If I was in charge, all phones would be required to have a built-in taser. The recipient of a call should have a button they can press to tase the caller. This taser must be strong enough to seriously injure a human, like, burn ward you never hear out of that ear again strong enough, or strong enough to set any computer that phone is attached to on fire. Capital offense to remove or disable the taser from a phone.

That would solve the problem I think.