Windows platform is it’s own worst enemy

Windows platform is it’s own worst enemy

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Web apps are not taking over Windows because they’re better suited for desktop computing. In many cases, they aren’t. They’re taking over because they offer reliability to developers who no longer want to invest in the Windows platform

Ouch – but as a one-time native Windows application developer that owned a product with over a million downloads a year – I found this article to be largely true.

Microsoft has had a very scattered history of poorly developed native UI frameworks for over a decade now. While bloaty and often slow, web UI frameworks offer a consistent, stable, well tooled, large available workforce solution that works on almost all platforms. While not perfect, it is at the forefront of new design developments and presents a much less risky development platform for developers.

While Microsoft claims to be forming a team to build OS native apps again, I am guessing they’ll go the way of too many other Microsoft initiatives: Take a good start on a real problem, suffer from over-exuberance, try to re-design and re-invent the wheel with an over-engineered solution, launch it half-heartedly, almost nobody adopts it, the team quietly dies, and now you have N+1 incomplete solutions.

Use your smartphone to load old programs on an Apple II

Use your smartphone to load old programs on an Apple II

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ASCII Express lets you load programs into your old Apple II (or any computer with an analog cassette port). You simply use your smart phone (or any computer’s out audio jack) plugged into the audio jack to load it into the system.
They even include a program that will take image files and via a simple basic program, accept the incoming data and then write it to one of the floppy disks – similar to ADTPro. No need for expensive drive emulation hardware.

When your school system is so bad 20% of people pull their kids out

When your school system is so bad 20% of people pull their kids out

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It’s a big open secret that Portland and Oregon Public Schools are some of the worst in the country – last year ranking 45th out of 50 states. Ranking well behind every southern state, Texas, Mississippi, Florida, and well – just about everybody. This isn’t because of funding that ranks as some of the highest per student in the country nor from a lack of complete Democratic party control over all levels of the government for more than 30 years. It has some of the highest funding per student, while delivering some of the worst results in the entire country.

Since Covid over 12% of students have been pulled from declining and failing Portland schools and it is projected that it will likely reach more than a 24% attendance drop. Public school enrollment in Oregon dropped by more than 22,000 after COVID-19 and continues to decline. But that hasn’t stopped the school system from adding almost 12,000 new employees – even while enrollments were dramatically declining.

It’s reached the point Portland schools will be closed soon – up to 5 of the 10 schools in the district.

Additionally, the school year has been chopped to one of the shortest in history as teachers take furlough days. I mean, where could all this money be going? It’s not like the Portland school district has a communications department that costs as much to run each year as an entire high school?

But maybe it’s lack of funding. Despite passing multiple bonds at or over a billion dollars, they have failed to modernize nor make schools earthquake safe as was promised in EACH of the 4 bond measures passed in the last decade. Each one seems to assume people forgot they gave them over half a billion dollars to fix school buildings 4 times in a row.

  • 2012 School Building Improvement Bond – $482 million
  • 2017 Health, Safety and Modernization Bond – $790 million
  • 2020 School Bond – $1.2 billion
  • 2025 School Bond – $1.8 billion

And they are right – Portland voters overwhelmingly vote each new failure in. I mean, why bother even lying when audits are ignored and nobody loses their job when they fix 0 out of 10 serious deficiencies in bond performance. Waste and negligence abound in Portland schools.

Intelligent parents appear to be voting with their feet. They’re pulling their kids out of schools that are seismically unsafe, as well physically unsafe for their children as violent students are regularly put right back into classrooms with children they have assaulted due to a misguided sense of restorative justice.

And don’t forget the highly politicized teachers. Portland went through an embarrassing teacher’s union strike that turned into a pro-Palestinian protest group. The teachers were also encouraged to use teaching materials that instructed kids to pray to Allah for the destruction of Israel. The teaching union only later had to agree to barely any changes since it turns out there really wasn’t more money and are now being sued by parents for damages. Students are encouraged to go to protests instead of school days (with a number of schools that won’t count skipping school to protest as unexcused).

Archdiocese of Roblox?

Archdiocese of Roblox?

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It appears some (seemingly young) folks are using Roblox to re-create various celebrations of the Catholic Church. They have quaintly called themselves the ‘Archdiocese of Roblox‘.

They seem to use music, audio, and clips from real celebrations – with possibly only the individually spoken readings and priest parts re-created by characters.

This is not a comedy or spoof. The few I have seen are pretty reverent and they genuinely doing a good job. It’s fascinating to see young people engaging their faith – continuing a several year trend of a dramatic increase in people, and especially young people, coming to churches.

While none of these are valid sacraments, they are invitations to pray and possibly to experience faith in a way that might be inviting to others that might not experience God in any other way.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

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“Unless those harm reduction studies include the harm to the community … I fail to see how any harm reduction study could be taken seriously” – public commentary

State Sen. Lisa Reynolds killed a bill that would ban distributing needle and drug use paraphernalia that were regularly occurring within 1 block of elementary schools and filling residential areas with so many addicts passed out on the streets that the nearby McDonalds was jokingly called Fent-donalds. Multiple businesses said the conditions had gotten so bad they were closing their shops in the area due to safety for their employees. All of this well within the ‘drug free zones’ around at least one elementary school as specified by city ordinance.

I personally have seen and dealt with the results. There were countless people slumped on sidewalks surrounding the distribution areas after every handout. Even worse, the Portland People’s Outreach Project that were doing these programs often became physically hostile and intimidated anyone that would complain or question them. (more comments here if you can stomach them)

Sadly, “harm reduction” activities like these programs have not saved lives – quite the opposite. Even better, as should be 100% expected from non-profit organizations with absolutely no academic or other credentials, the policies have directly caused deaths to have more than tripled since they started.

Young People and Appstinence

Young People and Appstinence

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“It’s not obvious to us…that’s why in addiction research abstention plays such a big role because when you remove the stimulus it gives you a lot to learn about how much control it had over you.”

The studies cannot be more clear. The idea that technologies like social media were going to save us from loneliness and democratizing knowledge, while starting out very promising, are starting to become largely false. While social media and the internet have created wonderful things and connections, the tide is very rapidly changing. In just 2 years, the number of young people saying social media is mostly harmful/negative to their age group went from 32% to 48%. That’s basically 1 in 2 young people that now believe social media is mostly harmful.

Gabriela Nguyen is part of a growing trend of Gen Z and younger people that are not just reducing, but getting completely off social media. So much so, this Harvard master’s student has created an organization called Appstinence which helps people navigate life without social media.

I for one agree with what she found. I found that limiting exposure didn’t really work that well – it was far easier to just finally delete the app. My overall mental health went dramatically up, I started spending more time with people and volunteer activities. Feelings of FOMO largely went away. I started doing things *I* wanted to do, just for me. I realized I had been doing too many things based on how it would look on social media. I’m no longer on Facebook (besides the marketplace), Instagram, Reddit, or any other major social media site. I kept LinkedIn for professional purposes, but never post and don’t spend time scrolling other’s posts. To the online world, it probably looks like I died somewhere around 2021 (save for this blog). Overall, my life has improved 10 fold. I still use the internet for research and learning; but it’s on a computer so my time is bounded. It reminds me of this:

How far we’ve come in just 30 years. This is what high school was like before social media.

LLM’s are creating a new Y2K

LLM’s are creating a new Y2K

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In just the last 6 months, LLM’s are now find bugs and security issues in code that nobody has found in literally decades of investigations.

More terrifying? This isn’t your game code – it’s code that runs everything. Bugs in the Linux kernel that have been there since 2003 but were found by an LLM in minutes. Bugs in packages that have been around for 25 years. Bugs so bad that they give you access to almost anything. The rate of bug discovery by LLM’s is now on an exponential curve that is unlikely to stop anytime soon. In fact, he knows of hundreds of kernel bugs he cannot file because he simply can’t keep up with verifying them at the rate the LLM’s are finding them.

Based on current AI progression, he believes LLM’s will be better at finding bugs than the top 1-2% of vulnerability researchers in less than a year – and that power will likely be available not with GPU’s in the cloud, but on LLM’s you can run on your laptop. With this facing the world of computing, it’s highly likely bad actors could nearly completely destroy and hijack banking systems, just about any online service, and critical infrastructure. Almost everything could be open to hackers in just months.

We’re facing a real Y2K situation. It’s happened so fast that almost everyone is in denial or simply doesn’t know it’s happening.

IRIX under Mame

IRIX under Mame

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kaiyimi has one of the better videos on getting an SGI IRIX system. Looks like you have to use specific versions of MAME64 (223) and jump through lots of hoops – but it seems like a workable solution.

I would love to know how he set up the original hard drive image.