You’d need to rollback the last 70 years of pensions being replaced by 401k plans and/or limit responsibility to the brokers. If you hire a licensed plumber that ends up flooding your neighbor’s place, the plumber is the one getting sued.

It would probably also be good to restructure retirement incentives away from the stock market, but that’s not going to happen overnight either.

Google also accidentally deleted a random amount of user’s timeline data if you didn’t immediately catch it and restore from back up last March before the affected backups were overwritten. If you didn’t keep a close enough watch on your timeline to know that that happened, everything before ~Feb 2025 is gone now.

Ask me how I know. Yes I kept up on permissions. Yes I had backups on. No I didn’t have a new device. I even have dozens of available gigabytes of paid storage on Google One.

I’m sure it will only get more stable due to maps and timeline being revenue generators that encourage investment.

And what I mean is that prior to the mid 1900s the etymology didn’t exist to cause that confusion of terms. Neither Babbage’s machines nor prior adding engines were called computers or calculators. They were ‘machines’ or ‘engines’.

Babbage’s machines were novel in that they could do multiple types of operations, but ‘mechanical calculators’ and counting machines were ~200 years old. Other mathematical tools like the abacus are obviously far older. They were not novel enough to cause confusion in anyone with even passing interest.

But there will always be people who just assume ‘magic’, and/or “it works like I want it to”.

“Computer” meaning a mechanical/electro-mechanical/electrical machine wasn’t used until around after WWII.

Babbag’s difference/analytical engines weren’t confusing because people called them a computer, they didn’t.

“On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

• Charles Babbage

If you give any computer, human or machine, random numbers, it will not give you “correct answers”.

It’s possible Babbage lacked the social skills to detect sarcasm. We also have several high profile cases of people just trusting LLMs to file legal briefs and official government ‘studies’ because the LLM “said it was real”.

I think because it’s language.

There’s a famous quote from Charles Babbage when he presented his difference engine (gear based calculator) and someone asking “if you put in the wrong figures, will the correct ones be output” and Babbage not understanding how someone can so thoroughly misunderstand that the machine is, just a machine.

People are people, the main thing that’s changed since the Cuneiform copper customer complaint is our materials science and networking ability. Most things that people interact with every day, most people just assume work like it appears to on the surface.

And nothing other than a person can do math problems or talk back to you. So people assume that means intelligence.

The moons of Jupiter and Saturn were called satellite planets from their discovery until sometime in the 20th century.

The first several asteroids were called planets, until enough were discovered that the term ‘asteroid’ was invented and they were renamed.

The first Kuiper belt objects were called planets, until enough were discovered that it turns out Pluto is mostly just a particularly reflective example.

Pluto was not the first 9th planet. Then again we were up to 13(?) at one point.

The “magnetic forces do no work” thing is maddening.

The guy who is ‘the guy’ for that level of physics textbooks just happens to be determined to prove a non-quantum mechanics based explanation of magnetism so the book is written from that perspective without actually saying it. Of course.

In theory yes, but not a lot of people are uploading their family photo albums AFAIK.

I think it would be interesting to have some kind of global archive. Even if descendants don’t care “now” has the potential to be the beginning of the best documented era in history. Historians would kill for photographs by random average people from any other time.

A lot of people thought that that’s what the Internet would be, but that’s obviously not the case. And I know the “right to be forgotten” is a thing, and deservedly so, but at some point you’re throwing out the wine with the amphora.

It’s a slider from 50% to 100%.

It helps when you don’t care if the answers are true, just that you have “answers”.

Building from source is always going to come with complications. That’s why most people don’t do it. A docker compose file that ‘just’ downloads the stable release from a repo and starts running is dramatically more simple than cross-referencing all your services to make sure there are no dependency conflicts.

There’s an added layer of complexity under the hood to simplify the common use case.

You can install key and screen loggers if you want. Could even setup offsite backup and rclone it all wherever you want.

Mathematically worse.

This is/was letting a contract expire. It’s not something that was brought up to the level of congress. Up until the last few years of supreme court decisions agencies were founded with broad powers in their domains, including discontinuing sub-programs.

That’s how it’ supposed to work. None of this has been brought to a vote, which would give Democrats the opportunity to oppose it. For “some reason” congressional Republicans are continuing their prior strategy while being a majority and having the leadership of just, not doing things.

This is not a law.

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5-10h battery life. Their goal list includes 20h idle time and recording video. It seems to be using some nonstandard SIM and only has GNSS, not GPS. Which is probably fine functionally but apparently they weren’t able to source a GPS chip to use the US system that met whatever their standards are? Large list of negatives for something the price of a shiny new foldable, or several non-foldable smartphones.

They also seem to be doing the usual dance of “Made in USA!!!*”

* what you think of when you think “electronic components” sourced from Asian countries, mostly we’re talking about assembly and that this is where it’s put in the consumer packaging.

To detrumpify / reiterate, because reading what Trump says always feels like a stroke even if you’re not experiencing one:

How “Germany” treated Jews, showing signs of love like:

• Gave them ‘help’
• Liked them
• Winking
• Gave extra bread sometimes
• Gave extra meals sometimes

How Hamas treated hostages:

• Not as well as Nazis

Good lord. Apparently Auschwitz was a hot bed of *checks notes* undesired winking? /s