Will do.

Me too, on the VIC-20.

Nice. I think I still prefer Atkinson Hyperlegible: https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont

It just had to turn it upside down!

I think something like the Commodore PET might qualify. Back in the day, I saw it used for everything from cash registers to accountants’ workstations, but rarely for anything else.

I think that the original IBM PC was conceived and marketed as a business machine and only grew beyond that because of Microsoft’s deep commitment to it as a platform and IBM’s uncharacteristicly open specifications and design.

If not for that combination, the PC might never have left the office and most of us would have stuck with the companies who were actually breaking new ground, Apple and Commodore.

Florida House Bill 1 would prohibit children under the age of 16 from using most social media platforms, regardless of parental approval.

The social media platforms the bill would target include any site that tracks user activity, allows children to upload content or uses addictive features designed to cause compulsive use.

How would this even work? Let’s take a closer look at the first 2 clauses of the second paragraph:

A student portal for accessing lessons and submitting assignments would require tracking activity and uploading content. If that system is accessible to students or anyone else from anywhere other than direct connection to the school LAN, then it would be in contravention of this law.

Or let’s say someone puts up a self-hosted, restricted-access system for extended family to stay in touch without using a commercial or public system (something I’m in the process of doing). Allowing teenagers to use that site would put them on the wrong side of the law.

Brain damaged authoritarian nut jobs…

That doesn’t surprise me. I have Haiku running in a VM, but haven’t looked at it in 2 years, despite the fact I used BeOS as a daily driver back in the day.

Well, if you want “compile something unstable yourself,” here is their official documentation for ARM64.

And here is someone’s progress report on porting to RISC-V. They seem to have started in 2021, so maybe they were successful.

When I was looking at 3D printers, my wife asked me if I thought I could make money with it. I said “not in a million years.” She asked me what I was waiting for, then. Two weeks later I was printing the test model! Sadly, I’ve made basically no progress with “real” CAD, so I do everything in TinkerCAD.

Fine woods and metals are crazy expensive, but if you keep your eyes open and aren’t afraid to ask, a lot of pretty nice stuff is available for free or close to it as long as you’re willing to put the time in on reclamation. I just got a nice Schubert chokecherry log for helping take it down and clean up. I got some sheet steel and light duty tubing from some discarded BBQs. And I’ve got more poplar than I know what to do with. Poplar is the go to tree for yards around here and there is hardly a week that goes by without someone taking down an old tree.

my hobby is finding new hobbies

Sounds a bit like me. I just retired in June and am busy setting up my workshop. The original intention was woodworking with a focus on boatbuilding. As I go, I realize that I’m actually headed more in the direction of hobby manufacturing: a variety of stuff in wood and metal with a side order of 3D printing. On top of rebooting my programming hobby of learning a new language every year from before I “sold out” to Visual Basic and Access.

Don’t sweat it. I used to feel the same way. Then, somewhere in my 50s, I realized that I actually had already been doing what I wanted: everything. “Jack of all trades, master of none”.

I did strive toward mastery of most things I tried that I liked enough to stick with for awhile. I like to think that I generally achieved competency, but I know that I had a few bosses and coworkers who would dispute that. :)

Learning new things and having new experiences is priceless. If you can find that within a particular career, that’s fantastic, but it’s not the only approach.

Check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks

I’m not the OP, but I’ll take a stab at it.

Amazon is being sued for abusing their market dominance.

Whether they are into the “smart toilet” business or not, let’s pretend they are and that they effectively control that market.

So then the “flaw” in the lawsuit is that all the toilets just stop working during the court proceedings and maybe beyond. That makes life more than a bit challenging for the prosecutors, regulators, judges, and society as a whole, giving Amazon undue influence, not just in the market, but in the courtroom itself.

This is relevant because Amazon is already meeting with some success in making their trial into a private trial. Some feel that this is undermining the concept of open courts and maybe the proceedings themselves. (As a Canadian, I don’t have a proper understanding of American courts, but it seems very strange that the OJ Simpson trial was televised, but Amazon and Google seem to be getting publication bans and camera removals.)

Feel free to laugh now, I guess.

To answer the question a bit more directly, I would guess that demographics here skew a bit older than elsewhere. That is just a guess, based on the fact that sdf.org dates back to 1987.

Two big ones. I bought the VIC-20 shortly after introduction when I was 21.

Big memory 1: writing machine language programs without the aid of an assembler. I couldn’t afford the assembler cartridge, but I wanted to break out of the BASIC sandbox.

Big memory 2: finding a military surplus acoustic coupler modem and using the schematics to make my own connector, then writing a terminal program so I could dial in to these crazy things called BBSs.

I first became interested in social and economic theories in high school (early 1970s). The books available to me were mostly pretty old, but I was also very interested in comparing what was said in those writings with what I could happening around me.

I read Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and their detractors. Two things I took away from that reading are that the economy must serve the mass population, not the other way around, and that, at least within a capitalist system, the population does not contain businesses, but business people and those people are just a small fraction of the population. My conclusion was (and remains) that governments must regulate business to prevent them from gaining power and must structure taxes and public services in ways that ensure that society as a whole benefits from productivity gains, not just business people. I recently came across this article that is an excellent starting point for cherry picking the good stuff from both theoretical frameworks.

I then read from the Chicago School of economics and the people in various fields who advocated and argued against it. From that I learned that there are those who would elevate business from being a kind of useful servant of the economy and therefore of society to the objective of the economy and therefore of society. (Something that I’ve recently heard referred to as “neo-feudalism”.)

I read who I’ll call the “social justice warriors”. So civil rights leaders, feminists, prison and justice system reformers, unionists, education reformers, etc. The biggest thing I took away from that reading was that certain kinds of discrimination (say, Affirmative Action) can be temporarily justified as methods of reparation and correction of historical wrongs and the ongoing generational fallout, but that the primary goal should be the creation of a society in which privilege is not an accident of birth, health, or circumstance.

I read quite widely on ecology, but quite heavily on the difference between renewable and nonrenewable resources. It’s less obvious than most people think. There are obvious nonrenewable resources like fossil fuels, minerals, and metals, but a forest is not renewable if not harvested in sustainable ways. Going further, that forest is part of an ecological system and ecological systems are not renewable if overly disrupted, so sustainable harvest is not just about planting replacement trees, but preserving ecologies, and not just for display and recreation, but for regeneration. The places we dump our waste are also resources and their renewability is based on the nature and volume of waste.

Some more recent reading includes things like Shock Doctrine, which examines one aspect of how disasters can be leveraged by those with the resources to survive a disaster to further increase their access to resources at the expense of those without the resources to survive the disaster on their own.

Some of my favourite reading comes from those who argue against the doomers throughout history. For example, it’s trivial to find someone who says Malthus was wrong, but very difficult to find anyone who actually argues against the foundational thesis that populations, including humans, grow to the limits of available resources. That is, breaking new ground, literally or technologically, can never be more than a temporary solution. Likewise with respect to everything from social service programs and the failure of critics to properly account in detail for the actual sources of profits associated with privatization.

For defining and constructing societies that serve people, I think the best writers are found among the science communicators, especially those who focus on how to communicate science. They describe the methods by which knowledge is gained, validated and updated, and disseminated.

So that was pretty long on text and pretty short on specific recommendations. Some of that is bad memory, but mostly I don’t actually find many writers addressing what society should look like, only that this one ain’t it. Even thinner on the ground are those who address foundational solutions rather than specific changes in one element.

There probably is, but I haven’t found it yet. I realized pretty early in the game (in human lifespan terms) that our the solution was not to be found in technology but in the structure of society.

In the long view, technology has always advanced, sometimes in “pure” terms, sometimes in response to situations, and sometimes in service to one ideology or another. So there is a sense in which the technology takes care of itself.

What doesn’t seem to take care of itself is society. It’s my view that useful social structures are constructed in opposition to human nature. Individually, we are largely slaves to intuition and a variety of cognitive biases, not least of which is the difficulty of separating a sequence of events from a true causal chain. We tend to embrace ideology, which is about doing what we wish would work, rather than doing what does work.

The great projects of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution it engendered started paying clear and obvious social dividends following the Second World War in the wake of critically important foundational work done during the Great Depression. We were starting to make progress on global issues by the 1970s and then something derailed us.

I don’t know what the underlying causes were, but it took only a couple of decades to turn the clock back, possibly as much as a century on some measures. One of the things that gives me hope is that maybe that quick reversal is evidence that we can do it again, but this time in a direction that makes things better.

For myself, I’ve all but dropped trying to address climate change directly (except in my own life) to focus on the larger project of social change. That is my nod to “long history” because I’m old enough that whatever happens to the climate and its impact on me are basically baked in. Thus I’m trying to do what I can to get people around me to start moving toward a more just, equitable, tolerant, evidence-based society.

I think you have a view of time and history that is quite rare. You seem to be using centuries as your unit of measure where very few people can get to even decades as the unit of measure. On your time scale, or larger ones up to and including evolutionary or geological time scales, it’s relatively easy to conclude that “in the fullness of time” will “solve” the problem.

On ordinary time scales, where people look at the next 100 years at most, disaster is looming. That loss of life, major economic depression, and those wars you seem to shrug off as “business as usual” is exactly what is fueling their anxiety. Many of those people would say that your “fullness of time” view is actually a big part of the problem because it looks like complacency and can in fact foster complacency.

On top of that, few people do anything other than linear extrapolation based on recent data. So where you see little blips on a trend line, they see a continuation to infinity of whatever seems to be happening now.

And, of course, there are even people like me, who think that it takes coordinated effort at all scales from individual behaviour to the creation and honouring of global treaties to solve the problem. We already have plenty of those practical people you speak of and we now know that they are all but useless unless we can all agree join them. And we haven’t and aren’t. In that view the tipping point was c. 1980 and we’re now so far over the cliff that the creation of the right kind of society now looks like a pipe dream. Which means that only a “black swan” event or technology can save the day. Hardly the stuff of optimism.