We’re entering the ‘blockchain for every need’ stage. Expect massive money to flow into scams, poor ideas, and outright dangerous uses for a few years .

Before Blockchain we had ‘the web’ itself in the dot com era. Before that? I saw it in basic computing as a solution to everything.

I had a student came into office hours asking why their program got a bad grade. I looked and it didn’t actually do anything related to the assignment.

Upon further query, they objected saying that the CI pipeline built it just fine.

So …yeah… You can write a program that builds and runs, but doesn’t do the required tasks, which makes it wrong. This was not a concept they’d figured out yet.

They did that to my daughter. I’d setup a laptop for her. The windows boot partition was still there (my bad for scraping every last bit of Windows off - it was setup in haste) and she accidentally chose windows from grub one day. The Windows Bootloader decided to change boot options in the bios and then remove grub somehow, but there was no windows on disk to launch so it was bricked.

The next time I could out hands on the computer I scoured that disk clean of Microsoft’s plague rats so they wouldn’t get a finger in edgewise again.

woke Marxist liberal critical race theory.

Any more smooth brain buzzwords we can throw in there?

Every Olympics is a political catastrophe. I’ve now watched all too many of them. They’re huge events and all it takes is some controversy or a fuck up by some middle manager and the whole world freaks out.

Overall, this one East that bad on France’s, except probably the river pollution thing (which I hope pushes them to long term cleanup efforts). Most of the rest was all the USA (we’re #1 in being assholes to people) being assholes. Our pearl clutching about religious insensitivity, transphobic right wing hatred, and generally bring dicks was well over the top. So, that’s not on France, but the US and our own swimming in Christian nationalist right wing sewage that spilled over onto the rest of the Olympics.

Video games. I used to play 4-6 hours per day (or often more), every day. It was kind of my default activity when I wasn’t forced to do something else. If I ran out of steam trying to focus on work or family I would drift into playing a video game. The result was a MASSIVE sink of time into something that left me with little afterwards. I didn’t learn new things, I drifted away from my kids, and I didn’t take care of my home.

Video games are fine. They’re entertaining, but they’re also potentially life consuming. I watch people who want to do more with their lives, but instead they just put more time into some game or another.

I managed to kick the habit and it’s been a great 10 years since then where I play very little and only in very short, controlled bursts when I can play with my kids for a bit (they usually destroy me these days). With all of that saved time, my career started flying, my home is in better shape, and I actually don’t drift away from family events like I used to.

Aw darn it. Now I’m reading your posts with an Australian accent in my head.

I’ve been accused of being a bot in online games due to my robust vocabulary, resistance to abbreviation and slang, as well as pedantic punctuation use. It has been happening for decades.

Note: rarely have I been accused of a being a bot for my skill at gameplay. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.

Now, if you wish to truly delve the depths of linguistic proclivities, one should peruse the works of Terry Pratchett, especially the Discworld novels. Any and all of his works are wonderful prose and deep storytelling.

At one point my 1GB disk was the “big one” in the dorm. It was the windows share of some random media. I had room for the whole 40MB videos “Jesus vs Frosty” (The Spirit of Christmas) and “Jesus vs Santa Claus”. It was before South Park became an actual show, but people watched those 100’s of times off my hard drive.

When I bought a 3GB from Fry’s it was an open question how we’d fill it. Of course, that was just as the mp3 codec started to gain traction… Problem solved.

I have it on the shelf, but haven’t gotten to it. I’ll put it in the reading queue.

Do you remember the article about some university that accidentally walled in a Network server? It ran for years until they needed to put hands on it for something. They had to do the “follow the Ethernet cable” game until it went through the sheetrock into a dead space.

The Register still has the article from 2001: https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/

VAX/VMS was such a beast! The hardware wasn’t readily available to the public, though.

Oh, the wireless chipsets in the 90’s into about 2005? or so…that was a bad time for anyone trying to run wireless. Hell, MS Windows didn’t even have network drivers baked in until what, WinXP? Wiring computer together in the 90’s was such a a trial, both for hardware and software fronts.

I was lucky to score a 3Com 3c905b fast 10/100 Ethernet card from a bussy in 1996. That was well supported across the board (Linux and Windows), and the IRQ settings for the PCI bus memory mapped I/O and IRQs was well documented.

Edit: buddy, not a hussy, though he kinda was… Your call in how you want to read it.

I’m a Cryptonomicon person. The modern timeline is dated now, but the overall information warfare themes are delicious.

I was there Gandalf…

In comparison to the alternatives we had at the time, Linux was a fucking tank. Once it was up, you could expect to get 6 months to years of uptime unless you were installing new tools or changing hardware (no real USB/SATA yet, so hardware was a reboot situation).

If you got a Win98 machine up, it would eventually just hang. Yes, some could got a whole, but if you used it for general use it would crash the kernel out eventually. Same for MacOS (the OG MacOS).

The only real completion for stability was other UNIX systems, and few of those were available to the general public at a reasonable price point.

Way back in the day we’d download Britney Spears and My Little Pony™ distros. Times change, I guess.

And the same people who gripe about overhead cables apparently have no trouble staring at a street full of idling, polluting, and noisy cars. It’s really impressive.