jhbadger

18 ms·

331.
by jhbadger 1y ago
People forget that the credit card companies charge businesses to process transactions. Some stores/restaurants even give discounts for paying in cash because of this.
332.
by jhbadger 1y ago
Yes, if you include the back of the chair
333.
by jhbadger 1y ago
I've seen it several times at the Smithsonian -- it's life size, as in a person could sit on the central throne, and the side pieces are as large as nightstands.
334.
by jhbadger 1y ago
>I do wonder how Lee Sodul will react if we told him that the superhuman AI he played could not see ladders... and had other such key weaknesses. I wonder what Kasparov thinks of the fact that he was beaten by such a primitive chess prog
335.
by jhbadger 1y ago
>apparently Go is a bit of an old person's game in Japan Yes. Part of the reason Yumi Hotta's manga (which the anime was based on) was written was to get younger people into the game, and it is credited in part for reviving the
336.
by jhbadger 1y ago
>Carl Sagan just might be my favorite non-fiction author. As Richard Dawkins said, he was incapable of constructing a bad sentence. And Sagan was just so personable and seemingly humble. While Sagan basically agreed with Dawkins on most
337.
by jhbadger 1y ago
In many ways it was a forerunner of the sort of adventure game today that is called (originally as an insult, but the genre has later embraced the term) "walking simulators", in which the player simply explores an environment with
338.
by jhbadger 1y ago
I guess I never had a problem with the Infocom parser -- it seemed already so much more advanced than other adventure games that generally only understood two word commands like "GET KEY". In Infocom games you could say things lik
339.
by jhbadger 1y ago
Courses for horses, I guess. I find spending the time to solve a text adventure (ideally without hints) to be more enjoyable than most forms of gaming, but then I like crossword puzzles too.
340.
by jhbadger 1y ago
Today, sure. But you could have made the same argument with Pascal being more practical in the 1980s. And yet here we are 40 years later with Pascal having become obscure and Fortran still with us. While ultimately any programming learning
341.
by jhbadger 1y ago
It's not that simple. For example, when libraries remove books for political reasons they often claim it isn't "censorship" because you could buy the book at a bookstore if you wanted. But if it really would have no effe
342.
by jhbadger 1y ago
The author is an interesting character of strong, often contrarian, opinion. He's also the guy behind the Calibre e-book software, which was largely written in Python 2 long after that was deprecated. He even wanted to maintain Python
343.
by jhbadger 1y ago
Yes, the system is reminiscent of written Japanese in that way in that a word is sometimes spelled out phonetically, sometimes with an ideograph, and sometimes both for good measure if one or the other isn't viewed as clear enough.
344.
by jhbadger 1y ago
While the famines were real, and a result of British rule, that wasn't because India was part of a "world capitalist system". Capitalism doesn't just mean "people doing things for profit" but rather the use of
345.
by jhbadger 1y ago
That could explain the success of rebuilding Germany, as it shared a lot culturally with the US, but what about Japan? Japan was, and to a large extent still is, a very alien culture, and yet the US rebuilt it extremely effectively.
346.
by jhbadger 1y ago
Generally under colonialism, the colonial power actively prevented any development of native capitalism in the colonies, even if the colonial power was capitalist in their home country. The goal was to prevent the colony from developing its
347.
by jhbadger 1y ago
The nickname of the machine was even "Jackintosh" (from Macintosh and Jack Tramiel, who had left Commodore and then bought Atari's computer division from Warner). At least with the 520ST they really positioned it as a cheap M
348.
by jhbadger 1y ago
Those buttons were fun and cheap to hack for your own projects too!
349.
by jhbadger 1y ago
And when people made Apple II clones, most of them (like the Franklin Ace series) got sued out of existence by Apple. Eventually true clean-room ROMs were created like for the Laser 128, but that was fairly late in the life-span of the Appl
350.
by jhbadger 1y ago
According to the book they kept dropping the rates paid per item forcing people to work ridiculous 12+ hours/day just to get enough to live on, even in the low cost of living places they were in. It was like something in a cyberpunk dy
351.
by jhbadger 1y ago
Karen Hao's recent book "Empire of AI" about the rise of OpenAI goes into detail how people in Africa and South America were hired (and arguably exploited) for their training efforts.
352.
by jhbadger 1y ago
It's a laptop with a mechanical keyboard, so not quite as exciting as it sounds. I was hoping for some sort of mechanical analog computer.
353.
by jhbadger 1y ago
There's also the Maltese language which is an Arabic dialect (mixed with bits of Italian for historical reasons) which is officially written in the Latin alphabet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language
354.
by jhbadger 1y ago
It's even standard! (well, one version of it is called that) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML
355.
by jhbadger 1y ago
Yeah. Do billionaires shop? Don't they have people who take care of that for them?
356.
by jhbadger 1y ago
Dr. Dobbs was also good (and lasted surprisingly long dying only in 2009 in print and 2014 online).
357.
by jhbadger 1y ago
I love reading old magazines computer related or not. It really feels like a time machine when you read them, with the articles and advertisements taking you back to when they were current. And it is always interesting to read articles from
358.
by jhbadger 1y ago
I guess the era of actual mini computers (which were larger than the typical computer of today which were originally called micro computers) is so far in the past that the term can be reused to mean "machines smaller than current compu
359.
by jhbadger 1y ago
Newton wrote more about alchemy and theology than he did on physics too. There's a reason why Newton and Smith are primarily remembered in a subset of the fields they worked in.
360.
by jhbadger 1y ago
While I agree this seems overly bitter, the idea of such "pseudo-nostalgia" both fascinates and puzzles me. I get normal nostalgia for things from one's own youth, but not for things you never experienced. Not that this is li

More ›