Lemmy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)

piss assholes off

piss off assholes

;-)

Well, I guess there was 1 PC for the whole family. Analogue modems would scream as they talked over wires. A lot. If you picked up a phone in the house, you would hear the scream of not just the modem, but the person using the internet to put it down.

A lot of people had their own homepages hosted on Geocities or Angelfire - which were like free-form expressions of your facebook profile. Utterly abusing HTML and GIFs.

And to communicate with your friends, you used IRC, MSN Messenger, ICQ or AIM. All of them, as some friends wouldn’t be on one or the other.

You searched for information using Alta Vista, Web Crawler, Yahoo!, Lycos or Ask Jeeves.

Your email address usually ended in @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com (and regional variations, like .de or .co.uk, etc.), BUT, you also had an email address from your ISP (so aol.com, freeserve.co.uk, free.fr, etc.) were really common.

Listening to music was different. You would search for MP3s (people would ‘rip’ songs from CDs into MP3 format and upload them) using free services like Napster (the OG), then WinMX, Limewire, eDonkey. and you would listen to them using an audio player like WInAmp (on the family PC). MP3 players (like the iPod or Zune) were just starting out I think, so you tended to get MP3s and then burn them to a CD so you could listen to them in your car, or in your portable CD player, or even your HiFi.

Streaming video wasn’t really a thing, as modems are too slow, but, you could download movies (it just took FOREVER) and they would almost always be the worst cam quality you could imagine and compressed as much as possible.

Using Linux/Unix was really a huge pain as most of the modems were actually Winmodems so none of the manufacturers would provide binaries or modules for anything other than Windows, so they were almost always reverse engineered - and it was just a pain.

I could probably ramble on for longer, but this feels like a good place to stop and say “get off my lawn”.

Probably a reference to there being more than just HTTP. There was protocols like Gopher and tech like Usenet which were kinda precursors to HTTP and the WWW for information sharing/reading/communicating.

The UK has RRP as an equivalent, but they address the problem differently really. MRP is stop price gauging I think, whereas RRP is there to incentivise retailers to offer discounts to lure more customers.

We also have co-op’s that run supermarkets and banks, but they compete against private companies.

I think Europe is fairly social in its services (healthcare, pensions, etc.).

Renault seem to offer quite a few these days that are fairly small.

…Pretty sure it was offered 20 years ago in Scotland, a friend’s son was doing it.

I’ve just realised I haven’t used anything like that in 20 years. Macromedia Dreamweaver, those were the days!

Rise of the Mandarin-elite?

Blue jeans, blue blazer and brown shoes is the norm nowadays.

When they renamed 23c to 23ai I cringed so hard. You don’t install the DB and get an AI, you get an empty DB that has vectors.

And enabling employees to use AI more than the free tier is really expensive too.

The cost is upfront for training the LLM, then they have to sell the end product to us (to recuperate costs, start training the next 500B model, etc.), so giving their employees access to a higher tier of LLM is relatively minimal cost, inference isn’t exactly cheap, but I think they could afford to give their employees access to higher models.

But, this is Oracle I guess.

This sentence reads like Microsoft is the inventor of Javascript:

Electron apps are ruining the Windows 11 experience, and even the JavaScript creator has warned against ‘rushed web UX over native,’

So there’s 3 things, either they meant Typescript, they are very wrong or they’re quoting Brendan Eich and not attributing it to him.

So, now that this has been published by British Academia, how long before China puts it into prod?

Werner Vogels introduced in his closing speech at re:Invent this year the term “Verification Debt” and my stomach sank, knowing that term is going to define our roles in the future. The tool (AI) isn’t going to get the blame in the future, you are. You are going to spend so much time verifying what it has generated is correct, the gains of using an AI, may start to be less beneficial than we think.

Closed beta :-\

Just to add that Hadrian’s Firewall used to exist/does exist, I think. It was located in BT’s main POP in Newcastle.

I think the issue there is the k-ID software asks you to do things like open your mouth, then close your mouth - so you’d need to find stock photos of the same person doing stuff like that. Which, now that I think about it, I imagine there will be an influx of selfies of people with closed and open mouths available on google images very soon.

UK: Had 3 heatwaves this year so far. And it’s always humid :-(

I’m curious how much of it they consumed though. I read recently the UK keeps on paying Wind farms (for example) to NOT supply the grid as they don’t need it at certain times, and it wasn’t going into batteries for later either. Just generated and…gone?