Or if it's even still readable. Intel when retrieving the 486 tape-in for the Edison project had to bake the tapes in an oven to remove moisture, and then had ONE CHANCE at imaging the tape as it crumbled to dust going through the reader.

China calling Elon. Come in, Elon! :)

SAS has been dead for 15y; it started with R and then Python absolutely destroyed it. No one teaches SAS in universities any longer, why would they? It's terribly expensive and absolutely fucking dead.

We migrated away from SAS back in 2017 and never looked back. The only verticals still using it are heavily regulated and running long-standing legacy code that they're slowly migrating to Python.

I remember absolutely dying when they tried to renegotiate our contract UP back in 2015. I flat out told them they were dead and we were moving away from them and they told me, "good luck managing your data without us!"

Two companies and 10 years later, we're doing just fine and they are not.

Not according to Kim Kardashian.

bah.

Let me know when they start making *autographic* 120 film again. I have the camera, and am dying to shoot a roll!

The last rolls were apparently made in 1932. The cameras had a flap that could flip up and allow writing directly onto the film with a stylus. When you see handwriting on an old picture print, it was likely shot on autographic.

[and, yes, in fact my autographic camera *does* have bellows!]

That Electrolux isn't really an Electrolux.

a couple of decades ago, in one of those weird corporate maneuvers, it sold the name, and now sells its vacuums under another name, while the buyer sells non-electrolux as Electrolux.

So what she knows of Electrolux from the late 20th and early 21st centuries no longer applies.

But, yes, they were very good and lasted forever. Also extremely pricey.

Jassy verified the layoffs had nothing to do with AI.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.axios.com%2F2025%2F10%2F...

Bullshit. We lived through it, dumbass.

try using mirrors. What could go wrong? :)

We had to have our entire roof reshingled after a particularly bad storm.

It turns out that of the various colors, the lightest (or 2?) was actually energy star rated. So we took it.

It turned out to be worth about 2F inside as compared to the prior black shingles.

We got another 2F when we replaced the swamp cooler--the newer model had an 18" pad instead of 12".

Between the roof and the bigger pads, we only had a single non-monsoon season day where we had to switch over to AC this summer--in Las Vegas!

(I'm going to miss the swamp cooler when we move, but they're apparently not allowed in new construction. I have no idea when the cutoff was)

Elon finished the acquisition of Twitter about a month before ChatGPT was released. Elon immediately fired about half the company. This absolutely shocked the industry and led to countless predictions of imminent technical and business failure.

But what actually happened? Twitter struggled for a month or two. Then it was fine. Most importantly to tech executives: the company continued running reasonably well with roughly half the number of employees.

That blew the minds of C-level tech executives.

That highlighted the fact that companies had hired way too many people during the pandemic. Further, they could make just as much money if they fired a significant percentage of their employees instead.

So, these companies started firing people. Every year since 2022, tech companies laid off a percentage of their workforce for no real reason. Financially, they were doing great before the layoffs. After the layoffs, they look even more profitable. Regardless, the companies still mostly run fine with at most the occasional outage every now and then (I'm looking at you Amazon).

The fact that these companies can blame the layoffs on AI is just an added bonus. These C-level executives love AI and spending money. You need a reason to tell shareholders for spending obscene amounts of money on a technology. The layoffs are the excuse for the AI expenditures, not the other way around.

1. There are a lot of empty seats; a lot.

2. The demo wasn't live, likely due to the huge failure of an event that the Meta one was.

3. They noted that you do all of this 'hands-free', likely an intentional knock at Meta's offering.

4. The examples were...odd. Who the fuck is going to be using this to shop for a fucking rug? Come on; give some real-life examples that are IMPORTANT. None of these were.

5. The entire presentation's style, across multiple different presenters, was...exhausting...halting...jarring...and...really undergraduate level. It was almost as if they were being fed what to say in their earpieces, not from memory and not in a fluid and practiced way.

---

Personally? I love the idea of AR glasses that work well. I want to have live subtitles for humans talking to me as I'm hard of hearing and hearing aids do not work well for me, particularly in public spaces.

I want it to give me important information, respond to my environment in ways that are useful (telling me where I am really isn't that; I know where the fuck I am--tell me what I should be doing or where I should be going next, perhaps?)

I know these are early adopter level devices, but they're just fucking ugly due to their bulk.

I strongly prefer this option to Meta's simply because I don't have to do stupid fucking mime-style hand gestures, but I want this technology to be useful, now, not in 5 years. We're going to see this largely flop just like so many other AR/VR toys out there unless they make this something more than a gimmicky piece of shit.

You clearly do not live in the US. The legal system does NOT do anything about anything (other than child support and alimony) as outlined in a divorce decree.

And, even if they MIGHT do something, you have to wait 12+ months to get on the court's docket, paying thousands of dollars to glorified expensive secretaries in the process while you wait.

The entire system is fucking broken.

Ok, so AOL is pulling another Amiga. Big deal.

What we all want to know is whether or not we'll soon be getting free coasters in the mail again!

I didn't say I had a problem with it; I was just stating that it's very commonplace and it has nothing to do with 'renter's mentality' as it happened when purchasing a home (this is the 4th home I've purchased in my lifetime).