ahonhn

Ridiculous that I need to solve a multi-page capcha to prove I'm human enough to read a dull ars technica post.

I have on my bookshelf an unopened and still shrink-wrapped copy of Spaceward Ho! (Win 95 version IV requiring at least a 486/33). I like its bold red colour and the exciting way the unseen floppy disk and manual rattle about inside when I turn the box!

I should very much like to watch the Tom Baker seasons again, Sadly, I can see only the 1965 season 3 videos on the channel. The Shada link (and presumably all the rest of it) are "The uploader has not made this video available in your country" :-(

Computers ruining lives with wrong or misleading output has always been a thing, consider e.g. the Post Office scandal in the UK or Robodebt in Australia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme

It seems to me that most people regard computers as some kind of infallible truth machine. If told its spewing garbage they're more likely to double down and shoot the messenger than try and get it sorted out.

But wouldn't the text it generates reflect such motivations and emotions that were present in the training data?

Decades later I still have better muscle memory for the Beeb's typical ZX*? ( and ELITE's SX<> ) than I do for WASD or arrow keys.

A HN audience is so sure to parse "WA" as Washington state that leaving it in the title would be misleading with every second response along the lines of "I only clicked because I thought it was Washington".

Should it be expanded to "Aussie"? (since "West Australian", "Australian", "Sandgroper", or "Doubleyooalien drivers" doesn't fit the title field).

I reckon the location is secondary and the interesting part is about technology enabling universal and intrusive enforcement of easy to break rules that were previously difficult to enforce absolutely.

Such rules tend to have rather draconian 'example making' penalties attached to them because of that.

Is AI camera enforcement 'not a problem' in Honduras or Washington State because they don't use them there yet? Is seeing how it pans out somewhere else first of no interest to them?

This mention of verbs reminds me of Steve Yegge's blog post "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns" from 2006.

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...

I am happy to anthropomorphise a rock with googly eyes. It is when the rock with googly eyes starts to anthropomorphise itself that I get creeped out.

I often remember something I posted and wish nobody had ever seen it.

I stopped using a mouse when I moved from desktop to laptop computer because I found the touchpad is so much more convenient for keeping my hand near the keyboard. However, doing this for over 20 years means I'm now very stuck in my habit of needing touchpads with real buttons. All my attempts to get used to the awful buttonless modern touchpads have been an absolute nightmare so far :-(

Common practice was to increment line numbers by 10 instead of 1. Would give a bit of wiggle room to add more lines in later without having to renumber everything else.

WinAmp's yellow lightning icon is still sitting happily in my Windows icon tray right this very moment. Pageant is in there too with its cute little spy-hat :-)

I had SAS/C which came on 5 or 6 floppies and my A2000 had no hard disk at the time so compiling meant lots and lots of disk swapping and I used the RAM Disk a lot. Later, for a princely sum I recall being over a grand, I got a SCSI controller card and a massive 40mb hard drive which made the process so much more pleasant.

I threw out a 17" Trinitron last year. It had outlived all of the flatscreens bought to replace it and was still working, but after ~23 years the plastic casing was dangerously brittle. It left a trail of little bits of broken plastic all the way to the dumpster.

Very. In simple terms there's just a lot more of Brazil to deal with.

Brazil is a massive 8,514,215 km2 while Singapore is just a tiny 734 km2 island which is very highly urbanised and developed and doesn't have a significant rural population (hence the description of "city-state").

Its small enough that you can monitor mozzie levels at the individual building level, and locate and deal with breeding spots at that level too. That might also be practical in urban areas in Brazil, but for rural areas I suspect is not feasible?

Had such inspections before whenever kena red zone here.

As well as checking all these things the agent will advise on what to look out for. For example our unused plastic buckets in the bathroom are upside down so they don't accumulate water, ah! but then also must check that little rim channel as it too can also accumulate enough water from nearby splashing to become a breeding spot!

SG also has Zika which transmits via Aedes mosquitos.

The common corridors in many blocks also have "Gravitraps" they use to monitor numbers by counting how many mozzies get trapped.

https://www.nea.gov.sg/dengue-zika