I've been maintaining an emulated Pentium Pro 200 MHz Windows 95 machine on 86Box for some time with all my favorite old software from childhood. It's great for nostalgia, and if friends come over they have fun showing their kids things like SkiFree, Jezzball, and Encarta 96. Still holds up great for kids.
Yep, I showed my little ones Odell Down Under in the browser at one point, they loved it. A certain amount of that old software I copied to .iso from my physical CD's, but not sure where I could grab something like Encarta 96. Legally.
Had also been thinking about asking Codex to boil the oceans in an attempt to fully decompile or reverse engineer that OG of 1990s 4X games, 'Stars!'*, which I have a copy of, so I could have something modern and native for MacOS that kept all the mechanics. Maybe I should just do this instead, will have to investigate.
IANAL and I have no idea where in the world you are, but downloading (as in with an http client) an ISO[1] is often treated rather dramatically very differently than distributing an ISO (as in a p2p torrent).
Alternatively: eBay. Encarta 96 CD-ROMs are available for about $20 in the US, delivered.
This is the second time on HN this week I've seen someone reference Stars! It was such a fun game to play back in the 90s. I've had a similar desire to have Codex decompile a pet 90s game of mine for further modification. Not sure how far one could get before Codex complains about reverse engineering software.
Codex had no problem developing a big plan for me, but I didn't ask it to proceed. Maybe you're right and it'd of got shy at some point along the way. Thanks for that other thread, I must've missed it. Definitely going to fire up Stars! this weekend one way or another.
Cinemania 97 was a big part of this era for me too, though it was far less widespread than Encarta. Fantastic resource for classic film, and into the 80s and 90s, though it was bit quirky watching it get further and further out of date, like the big 1999 films that defined my youth (The Matrix, American Beauty, Fight Club, etc) all completely unknown to it of course.
Depends on what level of intelligence you're wanting to use. A vanishingly small number of people can or would want to go to the hardware expense of running something like GLM 5.3 Flash, much less something like K3.
And if you want Astra/Fable/Opus frontier level, then there's no option at all.
But if you don't need that, or you don't need speed... That opens up the discussion. I've been impressed even with how Siri's been doing with the Apple Foundation Models in MacOS/iOS 27 given how small they are.
Edit: I can't even fully spec the M5 Ultra Mac Studio you'd need for GLM5.3 Flash since 512GB isn't available yet, but it's already at $9500 for 256GB RAM.
> A vanishingly small number of people can or would want to go to the hardware expense of running something like GLM 5.3 Flash, much less something like K3.
It's probably worth letting the user specify their actual costs in such a tool. I run a Framework Desktop 128GB that I bought before memory prices got crazy; the current retail price is almost double what I actually paid a year ago.
We've got the technology to drill deep bore holes, kilometers below where water will move on any time relevant to human existence, where we could stick what small amounts of dangerous material is left.
Encapsulating the waste and burying it somewhere on an abyssal plain in the deep ocean should also be a pretty low-risk approach, the IAEA has looked into variations of that.
Like someone else said, I think it's all expensive because some people want it to be.
It's interesting that they're feeling emboldened enough these days to not hide who they are and what their agenda is. That general movement had a slow motion replay of the Bolshevik vs. Menshevik action, where the moderates (like Patrick Moore, Michael Shellenberger) got purged, and after quite a long time of having an established, comfortable monoculture now they're starting to no longer feel the need to create fake narratives around why nuclear or mines are bad, now they're just straight up saying they want civilization to collapse. (Which is what would happen, there's never going to be any such thing as an orderly impoverishment)
Maybe it's for the best. If they're being honest maybe it'll clarify debates and positions.
A couple points. No, entire plants aren't taken offline at once typically, individual reactor cores are, and modern designs work to minimize that. They still maintain extremely good uptime, especially if you're comparing them to intermittent renewables. Secondly, Italy isn't super tiny, and you need redundancy for outages and such in any grid regardless of its components.
Kroger's delivery service wasn't that bad at all, it was fantastic actually.
Of course, some things are too good to be true, they apparently lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the effort before closing it down earlier this year. At least they did in my area in January, my understanding is they ended it everywhere they didn't have a physical store presence.
Let me get it straight. You want to be able to engage with a commercial entity, but you don't want that commercial entity to be able to look at anything that results from you interacting with them? That doesn't even sound like a good user experience. I want the companies I engage in business with to be able to look at the data within the confines of our relationship and be able to do useful things with it.
If you don't want Google to be able to do anything at all with information you put into their system, easy, don't open an account!
I can agree with some of the other points, Google shouldn't be hoovering up mountains of data, etc. Just have to be careful of extremes. If you enshrine something bad in something as difficult to change as a constitution, you're stuck with it, and all your unintended consequences, potentially forever. You say "you can't actually enforce this totally in practice" but have you ever met a law firm? They would absolutely take the most extreme possible interpretation and milk all of society for billions a year if they can find an appropriate avenue.
This kind of extremism is what derailed some constitutional reforms in South America over the past decade. It started with reasonable center-left people saying some reasonable things, the radical left seized the process and wrote the final draft and faced with a choice between insanity and an unsatisfactory status quo people made the only palatable choice.
Your argument applies to the grocery pricing situation: "if you don't want the grocery store to aggregate all of your interactions, don't shop there".
All aspects of the commercial transaction should be clear and transparent: I give the grocery store cash, it gives me food. My data shouldn't be taken from me, and nor should I have to consent to my data to be taken from me in order to shop there.
Google can store and serve me my data. It cannot use my data for commercial purposes that do not directly serve me. Nor should it be able to aggregate my interactions in a way that serves to increase its own profit, as this, over time, increases the relative power of the firm.
I agree. Hand-taken notes are valid. If a single individual wants to follow me around in the physical world and record my every action, then so be it.
But if the single individual begins using robots to follow me around, it becomes problematic. The issue is in the power of the technology that is deployed. What's less clear is where to draw the line: can the shopkeeper type his notes (yes), but can he fill his store with surveillance cameras that correlate my every entry into his store (this one becomes unreasonable and this is the case for which we need laws).
When you buy a 600g loaf of whole wheat bread from Ralph's Supermarket at 6:17pm on Tuesday Sep 22 2026 for USD4.99, there is zero (0) reason to consider that any more your data than Ralph's data.
Just as you can use that set of facts plan and optimize your budget, so should Ralph's be able to use that data to plan and optimize their business.
Does showing you less ads for things you actually want to buy instead of more random adds serve you directly? You could make a pretty solid argument that it does.
No, ads are approximately never to your benefit, and if they are, it's entirely by accident. Their entire purpose is to corrupt your preferences or misinform you to the benefit of the advertiser. If you actually wanted to buy the thing, they wouldn't need to spend money on ads (and anyone competent would measure lift over a baseline, not just raw "did people buy the thing" for campaign effectiveness).
If you're to see any ads at all, it is vastly preferable that you see random ads for things that you would never be interested in and that register as pure noise to you. Things you could be convinced to buy, or propaganda that elicits some response (positive or negative) are the worst case to encounter.
The ads I receive in the mail from local grocery stores serve to inform me when stores that I normally don't shop at have something I already want on sale at a better price than my usual stores.
How is this corrupting my preferences or misinforming me?
There is no reason we have to make the false choice you present. That is simply Google holding a gun to our heads to encourage us to choose something that is in Google's best interests rather than our own.
The choice should be between X targeted ads or X non-targeted ads. They can still target ads based on the content of the page, no different from how television and print ads worked prior to all of this data collection.
Because in OP's hypothetical, it is the equivalent of a gangster saying "I can shoot you in the face or punch you in the face, which do you prefer?"
They present a false choice where Google is saying "We can do this the easy way or the hard way" and we are forced to choose between bad and worse. There is no reason we should not have a less bad choice: the same amount of ads but non-targeted. We, as customers, should not be held hostage by the massive corporations.
So delusional that targeted advertising (a massively expensive thing to build) makes more money than random advertising, and advertisers are willing to pay a premium, leading to some of the biggest companies on the planet being in the business of targeting advertising! Almost like it's effective at manipulating people into making decisions they wouldn't otherwise make.
And then entirely unsurprisingly, professional propagandists also manage to convince people that the proper reaction to being manipulated is "thank you sir, may I have another?"
It's not a mystery that targeted advertising works better than random advertising and therefore commands a premium. It's an unjustified leap from that to the scary sounding 'manipulation'.
> In psychology, manipulation is defined as an deliberate action that aims to influence or control another person in an underhanded or subtle manner which facilitates one's personal motives.
Does that not describe pretty much all advertising? It's not like advertisers are going out and researching all other deals that are out there and making sure that theirs really is the best, and then paying to put theirs in front of you because they're just so great and want to help you out.
No, they're putting themselves in front of you and hoping you don't notice that they're just another white label of some Alibaba special that costs 10% more than the other Alibaba white label. Or trying to pound into your head through constant repeated messaging that you want their thing when you don't, actually (oh and ignore that it will make you fat, give you cancer, lead to your financial ruin, etc. It's fun. And cool people do it. In fact only uncool people don't). Playing happy music when it's them. Playing stern music when it's their opponents. Look, if you gamble with us, you can be a BIG WINNER! LOOK HOW HAPPY AND RICH YOU COULD BE! etc.
Then to make it extra effective, they spy on you to learn everything about your life, and intentionally feed your insecurities to make you into a softer target. Some kids might end up killing themselves when they take that a bit too far, but hey, what can you do?
There is no ethical low to which that segment of society will not sink.
If you pay a bank for use of a secure deposit box to store private documents, would you be upset if they started advertising services to you based on the contents of those documents?
Or if your telephone service began messaging with offers for products on what you discussed in your phonecalls?
Yet it's extremism to think Google etc shouldnt be able to do this.
But Google is a monopoly, so you have little choice in the matter.
Unfortunately these things are never so clean as in the theoretical model. As a monopoly, there are likely many situations where interaction with said monopoly is unavoidable.
Nothing has changed, though. In my office the ones that have really boosted productivity are the ones putting in the effort to craft solid prompts and understand when to move that slider on reasoning effort and model selection. Or understand and put thought into how to leverage the tool, like project folders with the context to all or part of your job the model can reference. Everyone else throws a lazy prompt at the default 'instant' model, gets a crap response and then they give up.
Why wouldn't it be desirable? Is knowledge beyond that a child can understand undesirable because the child can't understand it? I think not, same with anything AI figures out that we can't easily understand ourselves. If GPT-10 Quasar grinds tokens out for 6 months and out pops a warp drive, and even it's executive summary is difficult for anyone to understand, do we get out the pitchforks and burn the data centers or do we go "Sweet, we've got warp drives!"
Why is it always a false dichotomy between two ridiculous extremes? Maybe inventing some dangerous technology benefits from human understanding for a bunch of obvious reasons, like human beings being responsible it goes well?
That's tedious. Can't believe nobody mentioned Parachute Backup yet. It had a moment in the sun earlier this year or last year when it first started getting traction.
I have a Mac, so not just an iPhone, so I use Arq there, it materializes the iCloud stuff as necessary for backup. But if all you have is an iPhone or iPad along with an external disk, NAS or whatever, Parachute Backup will do backups to a variety of destinations.
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