Why does a calculator need my fucking email address? We’re not pen pals, just do this arithmetic.

If society collapses, the time until people forget enough to make whatever’s on the hard drive a rare information repository worth its weight in gold will be a lot longer than the working lifespan of a typical hard drive.

Have to admit, the name “Recall” does have a better ring to it than “Take a Screenshot Every 3 Seconds”.

MS products used to be just Word, Excel, etc. I used to know the name of the guy who instituted adding “Microsoft” to all the names. I think he was a VP.

At last, hardware built to run my code!

Also are the Rolling Stones involved? Asking for a friend.

Maybe it’s the same normal human inconsistency as those of who support public health care and basic income, but ironically still buy stuff from capitalists.

“Help us improve your User Experience by trying as hard as possible to induce to spend money you don’t have on crap you don’t need.”

Fear = Profit!

Would you like to know more?

Okay, buh-bye.

2026 Teslas will have new AI Feel-o-Vision feature.

Those damned libs and their intrusive Big Government.

Reminds me of DMing an adventure that hinges on the party encountering teabags and hot water.

Good thing Trump saved you from all the awful foreigners dragging America down tho right?

Seek counseling.

If you don’t accept all cookies you get a login page or blurred content and a paid subscription offer. Fuck that.

actual document

Make what you want of it. Strange detail at the top: “Document 199 of 54” - wut?

When Biden stood on the stage with Harris after taking office I turned to my wife and said, “We’re looking at our next President.” I really thought they would put a lot of energy into promoting her as a logical successor. And even that would have been eleventh-hour politicking. The party should have been cultivating younger candidates years and years ago. AOC and her “squad” notwithstanding, US liberal politics is far behind the curve in promoting younger politicians, meaning not elderly.

I actually don’t write code professionally anymore, I’m going on what my friend says - according to him he uses chatGPT every day to write code and it’s a big help. Once he told it to refactor some code and it used a really novel approach he wouldn’t have thought of. He showed it to another dev who said the same thing. It was like, huh, that’s a weird way to do it, but it worked. But in general you really can’t just tell an AI “Create an accounting system” or whatever and expect coherent working code without thoroughly vetting it.

Please do! Are we talking about Microsoft Bob or what?

While I was there they were working on integrating presence detection. I saw some demos where lights would go on and off when you walked from room to room, and music you were listening to would follow you. If you were using a computer your desktop environment would migrate to a computer in the new room. Never saw that hit the market in any way I was aware of.

Lots of stuff MS Research did never saw the light of day. One time when my kids were playing Toontown I found a bug that let a player slip behind the graphics. You could see that the clerk at the store was just a legless torso floating in the air, and you could even go behind the walls and fly backwards into empty space until the whole world shrank to a dot. This same bug was present in a MS project called V-Worlds I had worked on a couple years earlier, so I always wondered if they had made a deal with Disney to use the code or if it was just a common graphics bug.

Very intelligent article in terms of painting a richly detailed picture. Falls short in reality awareness tho.

For example, it’s easy for people like the author who are immersed in using information tech to imagine everybody lives that way, but about 2/3 of all jobs still involve working directly with physical objects and materials. Of the 1/3 of jobs that could be done entirely online, only about 1/3 of those actually are. The author mentions that we also interact with our personal lives solely through electronics - to communicate with each other, manage our schedules, our lists, etc - but we used to do most of that on paper. Electronics didn’t replace direct interaction with reality, it just replaced paper and pencil.

Recognizing this takes most of the wind out of the author’s sails. Silicon Valley, the label they seem to lump modern technology in general under, which most people see as a handful of IT companies, didn’t start this phenomenon of insulating ourselves from the real world. We’ve had telephones and radio for about a century, paper for centuries before that, and all kinds of powered or motorized appliances and other conveniences all our lives. How many of us still have living relatives who ever depended on fire-based lighting or animal-powered transportation, for example?

Anyway, tl;dr I think this article is a fine example of stylishly writing up an interesting and stimulating point of view, which doesn’t really have a solid basis but is written well enough to convince many readers that it’s insightful.