Notices by Benj Edwards (benjedwards@mastodon.social)

The PC is Dead: It's Time To Make Computing Personal Again

My new essay on how we lost control of personal computing to Internet surveillance, DRM, and extractive business models—and how we can launch the era of Personal Computer 2.0

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/3292/

Maybe if we tried purposely making software worse, it might accidentally get better? 😁

Clip art collections from the early 1990s are forgotten cultural time capsules, freezing life three decades ago as digital illustrations full of obsolete tech, vintage fashions, and more

I dug through clip art CDs to find fun examples:
https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/3337/tech-time-capsule-early-1990s-clip-art-captured-an-era

Dear computers, what is preventing you from looking like this?

I have a friend with a 2015 iMac and an iPhone 11, and they have so many photos that they've run out of space. They want to copy the photos to the iMac, but it's not working in the Photos app. Is there another utility or a terminal command I could use to force this operation?

@thomasfuchs The HX is one of my all-time faves

I see so many people toggling on/off like a light switch. Something's right/wrong, good/evil. But I beg you to upgrade from 1-bit reasoning. Things can be bad and good simultaneously. In fact, most things are—in different ratios and for different cultural groups

Embrace nuance😁

I feel like Mastodon has turned into a more aggressive and less friendly place than Twitter was at its worst

It may be b/c the federation makes people feel entitled to say anything without fear of local moderation? I don’t know

How has your experience been?

Just a reminder that any device with a sealed-in battery is disposable by design

Any archivists/museums who wish to preserve smartphones for the future must remove the batteries NOW

They swell up and are ultimately fire hazards

Someone once told me to "live each day as if it were my last," which is why you'll often find me screaming in abject terror

I have been unusually glum the past few days, and I think I’m quietly mourning the slow torture and death of a friend — Twitter. It wasn’t perfect, but when tuned properly (key follows/mutes), it was an amazing community

You don’t know what you’ve got until you lose it

Prime Day has gotten too commercial. We need to get back to honoring what this sacred day is really about

In 1998, I stayed online for over 20 hours straight and got a warning email from my ISP

Did it fully register with anyone that Apple announced a wearable eyeball simulator yesterday

Ain't no sh*tposting like an Apple keynote sh*tposting

What’s your biggest eBay buying disappointment? Over the past 27 years, I’ve received items packed in used socks and underwear, moldy carpet foam, and dusty vintage newspapers.

Musty cigarette funk

Sometimes people use a priceless retail box as the shipping box

And of course, more things have arrived shattered and destroyed than I would like 😁

Yay, Ars Technica now has an official Mastodon presence! @arstechnica

When people compare engineering airplanes to building AI models, we're not exactly making airplanes randomly flap their wings at unexpected times to seem more like birds, are we? They'd probably crash unexpectedly while trying to catch an insect

Are we purposely engineering non-deterministic systems? And by which I mean, putting randomness into a deterministic system to make it seem human, and then getting mad when it fails?

@thomasfuchs My hypothetical scenario involves a fantasy LLM that is accurate