ROMs back then got erased by UV light, EPROM. EEPROMs are a bit newer (though still ancient) and can be erased electronically, nowadays it’s a very sane idea to just throw flash storage at the problem. I think you can get modern replacement for pretty much any ancient form factor.

The way those things are used are basically big logic tables: Instead of using a bunch of logic gates, you store the output that’s expected given a certain input. Completely ancient technique, the limiting factor is storage space and sensibility – storing all addition results of two 32 bit numbers uses a lot more transistors than a 32-bit adder, but if what you want to put in there isn’t a thing that can be implemented few standard TTL components throwing storage at the problem makes sense even if you never plan to reprogram it because burning a custom set of transistors onto silicon is expensive.

Some more technical info.

It’s an legit 8-bit CPU implemented with TTL chips, what makes it a different beast than what they did back in the days is that its microcoding isn’t kneecapped. It would absolutely have been possible back in the days to build exactly such a thing, even from precisely those components. At least the TTL part, that is, I bet there’s wibbles around VGA etc. And because I already hear the detractors yes, 8-bit CPUs were microcoded: They decoded single external instructions into a stream of “load from memory, fetch from register so and so, switch on the ALU, put what’s in the ALU output somewhere”. They kept it as simple as possible and it wasn’t reprogrammable but that stuff there, that’s microcode.

Implementing CPUs in TTL chips also isn’t a new idea, that’s how early minicomputers were made (later on they got some specialised chips). And those things also used ROMs for their microcode. So you could say that this is a minicomputer capable of pretending to be different 8-bit microcomputers.

FPGAs are a completely different technology, those allow you to arrange logic in a (more or less) arbitrary topology. That is, looking at that board with all those TTL chips, it’d be the equivalent of being able to re-route all the board traces as you please.

He’s accused of tolerating such distribution even after being alerted of the fact so, yes, he’s accused of distributing it. For an online platform “we didn’t know about it because we don’t moderate proactively” is a valid defence, “authorities told us about it but we didn’t feel like doing anything about it because can’t be bothered / frozen peaches” isn’t.

AI image generators don’t “consult” source images to generate an output.

Well, you have an artist breaking things down for an audience understanding neither the technical nor artistic aspect…

Modern AI generators are increasingly good at generating text. They still struggle a bit

I mean… SDXL still struggles a lot. The only thing you can get it to spell reliably is probably “Hooters”. There’s the one or other lora which makes it not suck completely but it’s still nowhere near actually good at generating text, the training just isn’t there. And even with that in place things like signatures are probably going to be gibberish.

While a naive (and cheaper) approach to AI generation doesn’t use layers, there are generators which do use layers,

Unless you start off training by feeding the model 3d data (say, voxels) alongside 2d projections I don’t think it’s ever going to develop a proper understanding of these kinds of things. Or, differently put: Learning object permanence (of sorts, related) is a meta-cognitive abstraction step that just won’t happen with the type of topologies we know how to engineer. It’s probably like 90% on the way towards AGI, so to get a simple topology to understand it we have to spoon-feed it permanence information alongside the (apparent) non-permanence.

It’s quite easy to trick people with untrained eyes… for one, they have no idea what “consistent illumination” and stuff means. And something being off doesn’t mean that an AI made that mistake because humans make mistakes, too – photographs don’t, but the general problem is not just about telling realistic stuff apart but also illustrations. You’re looking specifically for mistakes that AI is likely to make, but humans are practically never going to make. And yes humans get hands wrong all the time.

Here’s a good video about what to look for and what not.

European police is very much armed. Also the UK has armed units even if your usual beat cop is limited to pepper spray and a baton or whatnot.

Elsewhere police regularly carry pistols, but are also trained in how to not use them. In my state there’s even an assault rifle (actual one) in every police car. Decades pass without anyone getting shot.

I think it’s a blend, in my example the police would bring them into custody, and then trained people work with them after that working out what happened and working with the justice department.

Nope. Police is not trained to deal with e.g. a psychotic person seeing zombies, if they try to take them into custody they’re only going to make things worse. It’s fine if police are first to the scene, but they should be trained enough to a) recognise that the person is psychotic, not actually threatening anyone b) call for backup from the people in white coats with haloperidol shots and c) shoo away bystanders. Perimeter duty. Yes, after 2 1/2 years training you’re on perimeter duty get used to it that’s your job.

The US approach to a paranoid schizophrenic scared shitless seems to be to make it worse by laying siege and throwing flashbangs.

There are many things that police aren’t needed at, like domestic issues, but there are plenty we do need them at too.

That’s probably the bulk of what beat cops are doing over here, short of investigating noise complaints on behest of the municipality and documenting traffic accidents, car thefts, maybe a break-in, whatever. Which is also why they always, and I mean always, come in male/female pairs.

Donations are a tiny fraction of Mozilla’s income. Firefox and related projects are their money earners for their actually charitable projects, pulling in at least half a billion or so a year.

Not saying that the CEO pay is adequate or something, but your take is literally ignoring the article you yourself quoted.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
  But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
  And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”—
       Merely this and nothing more.

Presumably when we’re talking off-site backups we’re talking about a separate company sitting somewhere in an abandoned nuclear bunker which can justify the price of a tape drive or twenty.

Isn’t that what tapes are for.

Should all be in place. Even nvidia driver support. It’s one of the rare cases where I actually support nvidia on a technical level, that is, having explicit sync is good. I can also understand that they didn’t feel like implementing proper implicit sync (hence all the tearing etc) when it’s a technically inferior solution.

OTOH, they shouldn’t have bloody waited until now to get this through. Had they not ignored wayland for a literal decade this all could’ve been resolved before it became an issue for end-users.

Oh that’s easy (and probably disappointing): None. Not really a hobby of mine, more of an extension to doing the laundry and being a cheapskate who can’t fathom buying something new when you can fix it in the time it takes to listen to a podcast episode.

The other really valid reason is linen. Kinda unrelated to sewing itself and it’s not about stopping the stuff from crinkling (that’s right-out impossible), but to make sure that crinkles don’t always appear in the same place so the fabric has a chance of wearing down evenly.

Found this out the hard way because my linen duvet covers are oversized – nominal size is correct, but they’re made for down blankets, not flat ones. Blanket slides inside, generally towards the bottom, leaving a fabric flap on the top that really tends to crinkle as you sleep, wash, hang up, the crinkles don’t straighten out, exact same crinkles appear in the exact same spot and get chafed while sleeping, rinse and repeat for two years the first hole starts appearing, a month later there’s more than you can be bothered to patch.

Luckily it was a simple matter of running a stitch down the length of the thing to shorten it a bit, but given that an iron and ironing mat (not a full table, mat is completely sufficient) is significantly cheaper than linen covers or just the material for them, definitely worth the investment and time.

Oh and yes linen covers are definitely worth it because moisture regulation. It’s also nice and soft – not in the silky smooth sense, it has definitive grip to it. So are linen kitchen towels because they actually dry stuff instead of spreading water around. Half-linen is already a massive upgrade over cotton in that area and it’s much cheaper (the main reason why full linen is so expensive is because it’s a bugger to weave, not because the yarn is that much more expensive. Weaving linen wefts into cotton warps OTOH is pretty uncomplicated).

Programs can’t set position or size of windows, period, at most they can ask and then hope they don’t get ignored and it’s good that way. Window management is responsibility of the compositor, not of applications.

At least KDE has support for it that’s about on X11 level, a proper-proper solution is still in the pipeline. And yes you’re seeing right it’s been there for four years.

And nobody wants to rewrite Xorg or understand the code (other than very basic security maintenance).

That’s precisely the point: All the devs got tired of it and started wayland instead.

X12 might happen at some point when wayland is mature, as in a “let’s create and bless a network-transparent protocol so we might have a chance of getting rid of XWayland in 50 years” kind of move.

Yep that’d be Wayland devs maintaining XWayland, which is part of the x.org codebase. There are no “X11 devs”, they’re the ones who started Wayland to get rid of that bowl of spaghetti!

I argue that X11 would have hyperactive development, if we did not have Wayland

Wayland was started by the X developers because they were sick and tired of hysterical raisins. Noone else volunteered to take over X, either, wayland devs are thus still stuck with maintaining XWayland themselves. I’m sure that at least a portion of the people shouting “but X just needs some work” at least had a look at the codebase, but then noped out of it – and subsequently stopped whining about the switch to Wayland.

What’s been a bit disappointing is DEs getting on the wayland train so late. A lot of the kinks could have been worked out way earlier if they had given their 2ct of feedback right from the start, instead of waiting 10 years to even start thinking about migrating.

Making screenshots does, too, which is why that functionality gets implemented at the compositor level. And so will screenreaders. In fact looking at my settings panel KDE does have support for Orca. Dunno how well it’s working but it’s not like the issue is being ignored.

That does not seem to be a stray and yes there’s definitely reasons to take potshots at Gnome. They still don’t support server-side decorations. Everyone is absolutely fine with them not wanting to use them in their own apps, have them draw window decorations themselves, and every other DE lets gnome apps do exactly that, but Gnome is steadfastly and pointlessly refusing to draw decorations for apps which don’t want to draw their own decorations. It’d be like a hundred straight-forward lines of code for them.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to breakage you have to expect when running Gnome.

Wayland kinda is an x.org project in the first place. AFAIK it’s officially organised under freedesktop but the core devs are x.org people.

x.org as in the organisation and/or domain might not be needed any more, but the codebase is still maintained by exactly those Wayland devs for the sake of XWayland. Support for X11 clients isn’t going to go away any time soon. XWayland is also capable of running in rootfull mode and use X window managers, if there’s enough interest to continue the X.org distribution I would expect them to completely rip out the driver stack at some point and switch it over to an off the shelf minimum wayland compositor + XWayland. There’s people who are willing to maintain XWayland for compatibility’s sake, but all that old driver cruft, no way.