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.

Known VPN services have identifiable server addresses that can be blocked. Instead, you can set up a cheap raspberry pi (or other) at your home and use an encrypted SSH connection to that [raspberry pi] from far away. Then turn on your SOCKS proxy (part of WiFi Details on Macintosh) and check to see that your IP address shows to the world you access as that of your raspberry pi. I do this all the time, including right now. It also helps to watch sports events.

It seems right that since I announced the BBS Documentary production on Slashdot, I should also take the time to give testimony to one of its primary interviewees that took it from side fun project to meaningful historical work.

My goal had been to do a documentary on the BBS Experience, working from interviews with flexible friends and nearby folks, and then work up to the "Big Ones", the names who had been in my teenage mind when I ran a BBS, like Ward Christensen, Chuck Forsberg, Randy Suess, and others. But then I had someone from Chicago checking in to make sure I wasn't going to skip over the important parts the midwest had told in the story. So it was that a month into production, barely nailing down how I would fly post 9/11 with a studio worth of equipment, that I found myself at CACHE (Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange) and meeting Ward himself.

They say "Never meet your heroes." I think it's more accurate to say "Have the best heroes" or "Be the kind of person a hero would want to meet." Ward was warm, friendly, humble, and very, VERY accomodating to a first-time filmmaker. I appreciated, fundamentally, the boost that he gave me and my work, knowing I was sitting on hours of footage from The Guy.

There were many other The Guy and The Lady and The Groups for BBS: The Documentary, but Ward's humble-ness about his creation and what it did to the world was what made sure I never overhyped or added layers of drama on the work. Ward was amazing and I'll miss him.

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!"

Thanks.

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.