Maybe there is a cutoff date, but one of the presumed triggers of Alzheimers is stress and to someone who didn't grow up playing with digital electronics, Smartphones are the worst thing.

I knew someone who was in their early 70s and was talked into going from a semi-smartphone to an iPhone. Couldn't wrap his head around it. Sure, he could make calls and text but it was visibly "work" for him and obviously wasn't intuitive; pocket dials, accidental texts, emails as texts and vise-versa, things like that. Now add in that most everyone and most everything practically requires you to have a smartphone to do anything these days, and you're forcing a level of non-intuitive stress on people like him.

He had some minor surgery that needed to get done which wouldn't have normally been a big deal, but I'm convinced that it combined with the daily stress he was experiencing with having to use a smartphone flipped the switch and he died within two years from complications related to Alzheimers.

So I'm sure it is probably measuring people in the 50-65 range, but the people 70+ weren't "wired that way" and struggle with technology as it is. From the few people I've known who got dementia, it was stress related.

So will they retroactively path Airplay to run over Bluetooth even in older vehicles?

It isn't the phone that won't AirPlay, it is the car. Only until the last model year or two of automobiles have we seen wireless AirPlay, as far as I can tell. If you have an older car that only supports wired AirPlay, there are dongles you can plug into the car for ~$35 which will do the trick.

Remember that even Steve Jobs' kids didn't have an iPad.

WhatsApp wants to do this as a means of providing you with a contacts list.

I rarely use the app, but I've had to use it a few times to get in touch with folks in other countries. But grant WhatsApp access to my contacts? Not a chance! So unfortunately I've lived with half a dozen unlabeled chats in the app that I just know who they are.

So in my particular situation, I think I welcome the change the Apple has made - I am fine with selectively granting a few contacts to WhatsApp (since those other folks already added me and chatted to me), so now I can put a name on those chats.

I thought I was reading a headline that was along the lines of "Linux providers hate when you do this one simple trick to boost your startup time!"

A good friend of mine has been in the paper industry for many years now. I've asked him this question specifically about pizza boxes:

When wood fibers get saturated with oil it's not really a big deal because oil is hydrophobic and fiber is recycled and purified through aqueous means i.e. flotation tanks that remove dyes, inks and oils etc. So fear not... that greasy pizza box is 100% loblolly pine with a little smattering of vegetable oil. It would happily be recycled.

Well, there is a bit more to it than that it seems. For completely unknown reasons, macOS switched from sending an uncatchable SIGKILL instead of SIGBUS. Bug thread here. Fault lies completely on Apple for this one, and it seems like it affects more than just Java. I think this release is going to the history books as one of the worst releases from Apple; hopefully their QA team gets a serious wake up call from this.

The only problem with making it a college campus is that colleges don't pay much in the way of taxes to the municipality, apparently. I think it might be different if it is a public VS private operation, but the town would probably much prefer if it was kept as a corporation.

Now the question is, what corporation out there would have use for such a facility?

In the mid-1990s I sometimes went to a supermarket in Hamilton Ohio called Jungle Jim's. While they still exist today and were (at the time at least) an excellent place to get obscure food products, one of the things they are somewhat known for is their use of animatronics.

I remember that they had a whole bunch of ex-Chuck E. Cheese animatronics in the various sections, e.g. Pasquale was singing Toreador March in the Italian section amongst other similar pieces. While it was really cool to see those repurposed animatronics (since by 1995 CEC was well into obscurity and re-definition as the modern version we have no nostalgia for), it was a perfect example of what happened to those devices after years of neglect - pieces falling or hanging off, broken joints, rattling loose parts, etc.

Looking at the page I linked, it looks like they might still have one or two - but always wondered what happened to those things since I haven't lived around those parts in a very long time.

This is basically what I've seen come out of the tools. To be honest, I've only found it useful for simple boilerplate things like "open a CSV $f and create a list of the 2nd column entries", but in those cases a seasoned programmer would probably spit that out faster than the time that they write the comment to trigger the GenAI. However, you do have the bonus of that you are now producing commented code?

But anyone who thinks that the GenAI tools will generate good code architecture or even respond to the "create a clone of Microsoft Word in Python" directive, we are DEFINITELY not there yet.

At least from a personal observation of mine, I've known of one person who quickly went down the Alzheimer's path due to increased stress (loss of her husband and thus having to deal with all the paperwork he used to handle), but another due to getting a cochlear implant.

The cochlear implant is a hearing aid that is one part surgical procedure since they have to put something that attaches to the hearing nerve, and a second external hearing aid that has a magnetic disc that gets stuck on the wearer's head just behind their ear. They're expensive, but they work, but look a little odd to people who have no idea what they are (since you think it's drilled into their head or going through skin or something; no, it is just a magnet!)

So anyway, for another person I know, they got an implant to help fight Alzheimers to some degree since if you can't hear half of what is around you, it accelerates the decline. However, the surgery and having to manage the implant device could also increase stress which could lead to accelerated effects of the condition.

....at least, that is my personal observation. YMMV.

I have a vision of the scene at the end of War Games where the computer "Joshua" is going through an infinite number of WWIII scenarios before the screen finally blanks and admits the only way to win is not to play.

So now fast forward to a time when AI dis-information generators are fighting against AI counter-information generators are running. Perhaps it all boils down to a "uh-huh!" 'nah-ah!' "uh-huh!" 'nah-ah!' pissing battle before they shut down due to overload.

Well, that would be amusing at least...

Hopefully part of the major update is to make it work on the Mac again. I haven't played it in years since it is a 32-bit app and the last Mac OS to support it was Mojave (final update was July 2021).

Through the 1990s many people on Wall Street trading desks has Sun workstations running their business critical applications. Instead of Microsoft Office (i.e. Excel), they ran Applix.

Around 1997-2000, the migration to Windows NT happened. I think the reasons were mainly around that:

1. Windows NT 3.51+ was not as crash-prone as Windows 3.1/95/98 and therefore suitable for a mission-critical trader's desktop.
2. Intel's FPU performance was getting better. For a while, IIRC a SPARC was measurably faster than an x86 FPU. I think Intel eventually passed it around 2003 give-or-take.
3. Development of the firms' software was easier on Windows

Developers at those banks used to have two machines on their desk: Windows and Sun. However, that eventually died off especially when the UltraSPARC III was not all that impressive in comparison to the II of Sun's last "low cost" workstation offerings (Namely the Ultra 5 and 10). But that aside, now that traders would have Windows NT boxes on their desk, those took over and development was now on Microsoft.

I certainly hope they don't remove wired charging; various articles I've read that measure the power consumed found that wireless charging consumes roughly 40% more energy than straight wired charging.

I suppose you have to imagine the PR blowback to Apple on that one, especially when there are billions(?) of their devices out there. Yeah, we're not talking 1.21 gigawatts for a phone, but that 40% will start adding up.