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.

Co-op is the first thing we knew about Subnautica 2.

Man none of the best game developers can count to three. We’re gonna get a Subnautica 2 Episode 2 Part 2.2.

Subnautica 2 is a co-op game. How they treated respawns in Subnautica 1, where the screen goes black and you pop back into existence back at base agreeing with the game to pretend that didn’t happen, isn’t going to work here. So they need to acknowledge why you’re able to get trampled to death by deep sea wildebeests and then keep playing with your friends. Kind of like why in Portal 2 the co-op characters are Atlas and P-Body. Easier to explain why they can get crushed and then keep playing than Chell and Mel.

So is NoA the respawn bot? Does he/it swoop in and collect our hoofprinted corpse to reanimate, hence why he asks us to find a “convenient” way to die? So it’s easy for him to retrieve your pieces?

Is “You’re going to die here, and that’s okay” That whole line about forgetting everything and just exploring at first feels kind of defeated but she’s trying to talk you into being at peace with it? But if you have a resurrection machine…

I’m going to speculate that we’re the second to arrive, the first were the two women we hear. We’re going to follow their trail of audio log breadcrumbs, at first listening in on them getting settled in and “learning how to survive” but then when all is lost they’ll start addressing the players they know are coming to educate/warn us. I think the French accented woman is still clinging to hope that whatever mission can be completed, I think American accented woman has given up and is just embracing existing on this world, and is likely the one who biomods too close to the sun and wants to “go to the tree.”

Edit:

They released a series of audio teasers about a character that books passage aboard a “Pioneer” ship off to colonize a desert world that goes missing. The last one is a mayday from that ship saying “unscheduled phase gate jump, position unknown, crashing into the moon’s atmosphere. 40,000 souls on board.” Anyone here read the Battletech novel Far Country?

Alterra knew exactly where the Aurora was, she was on her planned sidequest to sniff around the 4546 system looking for the Torgals and had received the Captain’s mayday. And still they weren’t able to rescue Riley. The Cicada is lost. Neither the crew nor Alterra knows where they are, so…yeah “Forget Alterra, the life you planned on is all gone now” makes sense.