At a repair cafe, just saw someone with a chunky Dell Inspiron laptop that had a built-in modem and phone jack (!), which dates it to late 2000s (I believe), and I was impressed how fast Windows 10 was on it compared to newer cheap laptops.

When I was taught that Philo Farnsworth, a “farmer” who “invented” television by using the idea of plowing a field in parallel lines to display an image, I was completely dumbfounded. A farmer figured out how to build a vacuum tube, fire an electron beam, deflect it at phosphor-coated surface, and do so in lines, varying the intensity, to display an image? This simplistic “history” skips about 50 years of progress in vacuum tube design and absolutely fascinating mechanical television.

On that note, The Upright Thinkers by Leonard Mlodinow is a good book about scientific progress, and really drives a point about incremental nature progress.

When Steam first appeared (and was required to play Half-Life 2 IIRC), I thought that was a ridiculous idea to have a middle man to play a game. Well, what do I know, everyone loves Steam now (yet hates on other launchers).

TBF, specifically for games, enemy behavior has been called “AI” for decades.

More of a self-directed way, but check out eBird for submitting bird observations and iNaturalist for almost everything else. The cool part about iNaturalist is that your observations also get identified by other people, so you know the submissions have been reviewed. And you could help identify others’ observations too.

Absolutely. Somehow, Apple and Google convinced people (even more tech savvy ones) to want constant app and security updates as if the world would end otherwise. I’ve seen complaints about gemini (the protocol not Google’s AI) browser not being updated (protocol has not been updated since 2022), and someone asking if it’s safe to boot up an old Android 7 phone.

And Apple dev license consting money does not help the situation.

Now up the challenge: In App Store, find a simple app that is not a “solution”, “ecosystem” nor a “lifestyle”, does not have ads, and does not require a subscription for basic functionality.

(Years ago, I tried about 10 RSS readers, News Reader was what I finally found, way down the list)