It would be so interesting to be able to travel back in time to see how they did things. I bet there’s a lot of lost knowledge because something ceased being necessary to know.

But, you have to specify it isn’t actually redditors seeing the question and posting an answer. AI doesn’t actually understand questions.

It’s more that it sees your question and generates text near that question that wouldn’t look out of place on Reddit. Sometimes what it generates is good, sometimes it’s what a troll would say, the key thing is that it’s believable but not accurate.

It seems to me that with a reed you could also underline something or draw a slash between items, so you could do 𒁹 / 𒁹 for 61 vs 𒁹 𒁹 for 2.

Base 60 does make dividing evenly into 3s, 4s, 5s, 6s, etc. really easy.

If I were raised in China or something and used to memorizing / recognizing dozens or hundreds of symbols, then having individual symbols for the numbers 0 to 59 might be nice. But, as someone who only learned a 26 letter alphabet and 10 digits I like base 10 because it’s quick to parse a number.

How did the Babylonians write 61? 6 𒁹 symbols, a space then a single 𒁹 ? Was it easy to tell the difference between say 21 and 3?

I’ve said it at least ν times, the Greeks had the weirdest system.

They’re also typically low quality screens and much more expensive.

I searched and couldn’t find a modern OLED from a reputable brand that didn’t have “smart” features.

So by “remotely” you mean “from 1m away”?

When I was a kid we handled this “remote silencing” issue with a broom handle.

Yes, it’s funny how a labour uprising in the US on May 1st ended up becoming the most important holiday in communist countries. Meanwhile, the Haymarket Affair is basically forgotten in the US.

It’s also ridiculous how people today think that an 8-hour work day is some natural thing that happened because everybody agreed it made sense. The reality is that the bosses thought that a 12 hour work day made sense, and it took protest and violence to convince them to change their minds.

Anybody who wants a 4 day work week or a shorter work day needs to be aware of their history, and know that the only way to get there from here is massive union organization, and probably violence (mostly violence inflicted on the workers by the powers backing the status quo).

8 hours of work is too much

If you feel strongly enough about that, you need to do what the organizers did to get to that 8 hour day: organize workers to form powerful unions, then go on strike, survive confrontations with the police where many people die, keep battling for several decades, and then eventually your shorter work day will maybe become a reality.

Getting to an 8 hour work day required a lot of blood to be spilled. I personally doubt that today’s workers are motivated enough to put in the work and sacrifice required.

The idea that people should be getting 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep is a bit of a myth.

Sure, a lot of people don’t sleep as much as they should, but it’s not like 8 hours is a magic number, or like interruptions haven’t been a factor in sleeping since proto-humans first climbed down from the trees.

In the past in England it was normal to have two periods of sleep in a night. In hot countries a period of sleep during the hottest part of the day is normal.

If it’s like a lot of other devices, it will realize that it can’t get to “The Internet” through that network, and might disconnect. It’s possible it will then look for another option, and might see an open network and use it.

Because if you want a screen of a certain size, there are no other reasonable options.

The same reason you might buy a phone that will spy on you and show you ads. You can’t buy a phone that doesn’t do that.

my wife and kids needed something they can mute remotely

But… why?

SO SAY WE ALL!

Unless you’re buying a commercial screen of some kind, you can’t really buy dumb TVs anymore, at least not from the major brands.

My TVs don’t get connected to the network because TV companies have started showing ads, and that was bad enough. Then came the fact that a lot of TV apps were making your TV into a residential proxy, making your TV into part of a botnet. And now, on top of all that, they’re spying on you.

The ads were bad enough.

In any reasonable world you would have control over devices in your house that contained computers and would be able to remove bad software and install your own stuff. But, these devices are all covered by section 1201 of the DMCA which makes it a crime to bypass any access control software. This is how Apple is able to block alternate app stores. It’s why printer ink is the most expensive liquid on the planet. It’s why John Deere is able to remotely brick a tractor anywhere in the world, and prevent farmers from fixing their own farm equipment.

What’s especially galling about this is that, the US forced the rest of the world to adopt this bullshit as a part of trade treaties, threatening that any country that didn’t do it might lose tariff-free access to the US economy. And now what happened? Trump just ripped up those treaties anyhow and imposed the tariffs anyhow.

I just wish there was a country brave enough to rip up the IP agreements the US forced on them and allow us to actually own our own stuff again.

The bigger threat is that they have no idea how to run a game company. EA was already hated for the various things they were doing to try to squeeze more of a profit out of gamers. Have a private equity company run it and that’s only going to get worse.

The last time there was an unfettered free market in housing was when pioneers were driving wagons west and just claiming land and building a log cabin by hand. And the natives nearby might have had some opinions on whether that was OK to do.

In the modern world, there are lots of housing-related taxes, tons of regulations on how the house is built, the house needs to be attached to a government-controlled sewer system, electrical system, water system, sometimes a gas system too.

To some extent that regulation is a burden, but developers also see it as an opportunity, because they can pass costs on to home buyers. They choose when, where and how to built in order to make as big a profit as possible. The government sets the rules of the game, and the property developers play that game to get the maximum score possible.

If the government pretends that it’s a free market, they’re letting the property developers play the game unopposed. It’s even worse when the government creates incentives to build new housing and the property developers just find some way to pocket that subsidy and then keep playing the game the same way.

Hell, the house my dad got when he was a train driver with a wife that didn’t work and with 2 kids is a house I can’t buy as a senior software developer with 3 cats.

My dad bought a house when he was mid 30s and the solo bread winner for the house a couple of years after I was born. I loved that neighbourhood. It wasn’t anything too special. The houses there are 50s-90s builds, 2-3 bedrooms, maybe 2 bathrooms (our second bathroom in that house was almost an outhouse in the basement – concrete floor, exposed pipes, door that looked like it belonged on a shed, etc. My dad and a friend built a back deck which was really nice. There is a park nearby. There’s access to a nice bike path. It’s not on a through-route at all, so the only cars entering the neighbourhood are residents or guests. It’s not near shopping, not near public transit, not really near any schools. It was just a quiet, modest, neighbourhood.

I’m significantly older, don’t have any kids to support, have been saving for ages, had better, and higher paying jobs (inflation adjusted) than him. I can’t really afford any house in that neighbourhood. The only people buying there now are multi-millionaires, but they’re moving in next to families who have been there for 30ish years and know enough not to give up a good thing.

It just seems to me that a rule of thumb with housing is that in general you should be able to afford to buy in the neighbourhood where you grew up. I know sometimes that isn’t possible. Cities get denser, areas become highly sought after, etc. But, if the neighbourhood really is basically the same, and you earn what your parents did (or better), you should be able to stay nearby.