Wire wrap is/was an underrated prototyping technique prior to PCB automation. Nasa flew missions with wire wrap boards.

I had an old Kenwood amplifier for years that had wire wrap board to board connectors; it worked great.

Haha but seriously, Trump is just starting to ramp up full kleptocracy mode. Each tariff change is going to be associated with billions in trades made with foreknowledge of the move. His robber baron friends will fund him and his regime forever. They can do whatever they want now. We might as well tear down the White House and replace it with a Putin style gilded palace for Oligarchs. Oh wait.

ID checks, driven by prudishness, are an absolute gift to the big social media companies. They're the only entities whom (a) already know the check's answers, and (b) have the resources to keep hackers largely at bay.

I am not surprised these laws are landing with such little resistence.

Its as if the big social media companies lobbied for extra redtape, eh?

Large companies love regulation and red tape because it usually kills smaller competitors.

Surprisingly they've generally lobbied against it for ideological reasons despite their economic incentives.

brer rabbit and the briar patch.

That's literally drone delivery.

I stopped using Chrome when they started doing the "logged in to Chrome" thing for all Google services. It seemed likely a creepy step in a vaguely defined, unknown direction. The signal seems stronger now.

Left when they disabled uBlock Origin.

I was 60% Chrome and 40% Firefox, now I'm 99% Firefox and 1% Chromium.

Google's AI Studio does not always seem to work well in Firefox. That is my only usage on Chrome. On top of some web application testing.

Same. The removal of manifest V2 was one of the worst and most user hostile moves in a long time IMHO. Though the impending blocking of side loading and other locking down of Android stands to rival if not exceed it. Really dark times for Google

you don't need to be logged in atm, AFAIK

I believe they're talking about the mechanism where logging into Chrome automatically signs you into many of Google's services across the web.

For me, the purpose of logging in to my Mozilla account in Firefox is to sync saved passwords and tabs between devices. If I was a Chrome user, I would want to log in to Chrome for the same reason.

The problem for me is the fusing of the browser with a preferred 'platform' of services. I don't want a partisan browser.

The purpose of logging into a browser has always been to synchronize bookmarks, settings, and extensions.

Chrome is a browser, not your Google account?

They're hardware projections into your living space of a massive system run by Amazon. It's the massive system that open-source will have trouble replicating.

Most people use Echos as voice controlled music players with occasional smart assistant functionality, this shouldn't be too hard to replicate in OSS. You could argue that the extend to which they're not making you buy into the Amazon ecosystem is a major failure of the product line.

Spotify multi-speaker playing + a LLM answering questions would cover what 80% of people need.

If echoes had an LLM behind them, they might actually be useful as more than voice controlled egg timers..

I'm going to miss his waffle-free 'Hello' intro. It is/was like stepping on to an airport travelator that's moving 30% faster than you were expecting.

For your listening pleasure, here's a supercut of Melvyn's iconic intro: https://pascalwyse.com/blog/2017/12/15/in-our-time-machine

Ha! I feel the same. So much better than the tiresome intros in modern podcasts.

I played this game long enough ago that I needed the LOD adjustment to hit 5fps. Nice write-up!

Aside: I would pay real currency for an official Brøderbund t-shirt. Probably not possible now. I always knew I would enjoy whatever game it was I was starting when I saw that ship logo and the 'funny O'.

I had 2.5 Flash refuse to summarise a URL that had today's date encoded in it because "That web page is from the future so may not exist yet or may be missing" or something like that. Amusing.

2.5 Pro went ahead and summarized it (but completely ignored a # reference so summarised the wrong section of a multi-topic page, but that's a different problem.)

Well, it is perhaps frequently suggested by those Ai firms raising capital that once one of the Ai companies reaches an AGI threshhold ... It as rallying call. "Place your bets, gentlemen!"