exikyut

No affiliation (I wish), but: https://gptshop.ai

This site apparently sources ex-enterprise(-only) systems and puts them into desktop style enclosures.

This is interesting (and the UI looks very nice), but it's defaulting to my Mate 20 Pro's front-facing camera FWIW.

Devbox seems to be semi-public, and/or offered to customers: https://devbox.microsoft.com/

Curious if there's a way random people can test it.

I'll bite; ok, what'd you do? :)

I wonder what that group of people would have made of https://youtu.be/zy_ctHNLan8

(Chaotic lawfully :D)

I wonder what happened to the building when us-east-1 went down.

At the moment there's a [dead] subling comment by the project author explaining what it's about. Because the comment is dead I can't reply to it asking further questions unfortunately.

The project was apparently designed and created on a phone.

I'm curious: what does MUC stand for? :)

What's this in reference to? Sounds mildly interesting

This was posted only a month ago: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-secret-history-of-tor... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44838378)

The article provides a good foundation for opposing arguments.

Excerpting:

> The researchers wanted to find a way to do the seemingly impossible — to give the military the benefits of a global, high-speed communications network without exposing them to the vulnerabilities of the metadata that the network relied on to operate.

> ...

> There are other implications, as well. For a CIA agent to use Tor without suspicion in non-U.S. nations, for example, there would need to be plenty of citizens in these nations using Tor for everyday internet browsing. Similarly, if the only users in a particular country are whistleblowers, civil rights activists and protesters, the government may well simply arrest anyone connecting to your anonymity network. As a result, an onion routing system had to be open to as wide a range of users and maintainers as possible, so that the mere fact that someone was using the system wouldn’t reveal anything about their identity or their affiliations.

> ...

> Anonymity loves company — so Tor needed to be sold to the general public. That necessity led to an unlikely alliance between cypherpunks and the U.S. Navy.

> The NRL researchers behind Onion routing knew it wouldn’t work unless everyday people used it, so they reached out to the cypherpunks and invited them into conversations about design and strategy to reach the masses.

[delayed]

I'm hijacking this comments section just a tiny bit to talk about Creative TextAssist. It can be downloaded here: https://archive.org/details/creative-sound-blaster-cd-softwa...

It was a speech synthesizer package that (I assume) used the CT1748 mentioned in the article (^F "CT1748") to render very 80s-90s sounding but acceptable speech. You could even precisely control the phoneme generation using a scripting language to make the voices sing songs, with surprisingly tolerable results.

My call to action here is that all the SB16 emulation in PC emulators seems to skip over the CT1748 and/or other necessary parts that makes the speech synthesis possible. Here's Windows 3.1 running in PCem stating "The speech engine cannot be opened. Speech commands cannot be executed." - https://imgur.com/a/bBOihec

So if anyone out there wants a fun project, it would be finalizing the emulation in PCem, 86Box (a PCem fork), DOSBox-X or similar so that this software can run. Essentially it's currently in a state of bitrot and in the process of becoming forgotten.

FWIW, X11 also includes a bunch of quaint background patterns as well, in /usr/include/X11/bitmaps.

You can try each of them by just doing `xsetroot -bitmap <filename>`. I have mine set to wide_weave, which is incidentally identical to Pattern 15 in https://paulsmith.github.io/classic-mac-patterns/

Does the GUI work on Linux yet?

How fascinating, the exact same thing happened to me!

> The old HTML mode is still there but is hard to get to and is supposedly going to be phased out.

Can you share any info on how to access it?

Trying https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/ (the /h/ on the end being the old way to get Basic HTML mode) just redirects back to the normal view and changes the loading screen to say "We're loading the latest Gmail version."

Setting my user-agent to IE6, or IE11 in compatibility mode, produces a "Temporary Error (500)" screen that says "We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. You can view the Google Workspace Status Dashboard for the current status of the service."

I have a vague idea the A20 gate was also used to defeat Intel SGX a couple years back, if I'm remembering correctly?

Potential counterpoint: apparently https://lobste.rs/ is down (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234075)

What do you mean by "sick"? Headaches from coil/flyback transformer whine? Perceptible flicker due to the CRT being in the corner of your peripheral vision?

I'm a bit susceptible to noises myself.

I didn't even realize I wasn't reading Wikipedia for the first couple minutes.

Google themselves actually have gone vaguely in the direction you're thinking, kind of, in the form of Cobalt: a stripped-down copy of Chromium that has specific, deliberate "quirks" that minimize memory allocation/ballooning in long-running applications.

Google uses it to power YouTube TV.

Unfortunately, while I'm sure I downloaded a Linux X11 binary a while back to play with, I can't find anything of the like available anymore. The release packages just contain a shared library, and the containers in the registry are just full of compiler toolchains (I installed ncdu in them and checked).

The whole system is mired/buried in layers of hardware integration fluff (because Cobalt is meant to be embedded in set-top boxes) and there is very little in the way of batteries-included demos, potentially to keep the product from gaining cottage-industry traction on older systems. Which does make sense, given that there are specific CSS rules that Cobalt doesn't follow the spec on, and I'm not sure where where its JS support is at.

https://developers.google.com/youtube/cobalt

The compilation docs are about as dense as Chromium's are -.-

https://developers.google.com/youtube/cobalt/docs/developmen...

I just had a hunch, opened http://sheets.new, opened the developer tools and did a CTRL+SHIFT+F search for "trix".

There were a bunch of CSS and JS hits. 791.

I think Trix is the internal codename for Sheets, like "Kix" is the codename for Docs (similar pile of matches for the term in devtools).

Zeroing in on this exact sentiment:

> ...that could be achieved and that we were roughly on-track on.

I think there's a strong lateral connection to this quote:

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

I think this has interesting implications wrt the perception of nostalgia, because nostalgia seems to be able to apply at any age to any event that happened far enough back in time; while the above theoretical model maps roughly to specific ages.

So I wonder what things are actually a partially overlapped Venn diagram of the above maxim and nostalgia.

In this case I think it's possible the idea that we were "roughly on-track on" with certain technologies - the notion of an emergent sense of structure that was certain to unfold - could map to some point in between points (1) and (2) in the maxim above. An objective analyses would instead recognize "success" as the survivorship bias that it is; but we're not objective :) - and I find that endlessly fascinating!

3D objects viewable in-browser can be found here: https://sketchfab.com/FloridaMuseum/models

So far about 800 objects have been uploaded, including within the past fortnight.

Some noninteractive colour images are available here: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/overt/gallery/

If they're "just" using Signal, they're likely "just" using stock Android if there isn't a policy requiring iPhones in lockdown mode. It's a very good question as to whether such a policy exists.