benjedwards

Yes, it's a big problem. I call it "agency laundering" and I first mentioned it in this article last year: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/08/is-ai...

Treating AI models as autonomous minds lets companies shift responsibility for tech failures.

That's really neat. I had no idea there was a Byte Shop in Greensboro. My wife's family is from that area. I live in Raleigh, NC. Now I am wondering if my nerdy father-in-law ever visited it back in the day.

Are you related to Paul? I noticed the last name. :)

Thank you, glad you enjoyed it.

I agree. Archives shutting down creates a huge risk for what I call "historical context attacks" in the future, similar to what you're describing.

It's about generating false historical context to support falsified digital artifacts.

I wrote an article about it for Fast Company in 2020:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90549441/how-to-prevent-deepfake...

If anyone is curious, in 2009, I discovered that Jim Storer was the author of the first Lunar Lander game and interviewed him about it (and also chronicled the history of the game beyond that). He later provided the source code, which was awesome.

https://technologizer.com/2009/07/19/lunar-lander/index.html

My favorite part is this:

“After leaving high school I never thought about the game again,” says Storer. “Until about a couple of months ago when someone e-mailed me about this, I was completely unaware of any Lunar Lander game other than the one I wrote in high school.”

This is a fun post, I appreciate the mentions. Matt missed my later piece from How-To Geek where I talked to Stan Honey and the Etak engineers again, then interviewed Asteroids designer Ed Logg, and he sent he his original sketch for the cursor. Indeed, his inspiration was Space War.

https://www.howtogeek.com/696738/did-you-know-the-gps-triang...

If you enjoyed this, back in 2015 I wrote a feature about Lore Harp McGovern and her business partners for Fast Company that goes into the creation of Vector Graphic in detail: https://www.fastcompany.com/3047428/how-two-bored-1970s-hous...

Fully-human author here. I wrote it as a joke (a play on a common phrase), since numeric keypads were often used as data entry for accountants and people using spreadsheets.

I dislike this too, although I can understand arguments for it in software that keeps iterating and (hopefully) improving over time.

I wrote an article about this issue for How-To Geek earlier this year that explores the reasons why the subscription model has become so prevalent: Why Is Everything a Subscription Now?

https://www.howtogeek.com/817963/why-is-everything-a-subscri...

Those dates were typos and have been fixed. Discmaster launched on Oct 18th.

I asked Woz about the TV Typewriter before. In an email to me once, he said he had not heard about it at the time.

https://twitter.com/benjedwards/status/1303784698662055936?s...