Everyone with Teslas around where I am recently discovered that this is super inconvenient when a nasty hail storm happens. I mean, all of our cars got totaled anyway, but they had the added insult of no longer having a roof and needing to tarp more of the car until insurance could do their thing.
With the cost of the bespoke glass, damage to it basically means the car is guaranteed to be totaled even in a less extreme scenario.
The richest capitalist in the world unilaterally axed USAID at the behest of his cronies, and has directly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children to date. Projections are 9-14 million overall deaths by starvation and disease by 2030. And that was just kicked off a few months ago.
Musk and Trump are doing a Holodomor in front of the world's eyes.
An innocent man was shot and killed this year in a foreign country. Unless you did everything in your power to stop that killing, you are equally to blame for his murder.
Python is also already all over the Raspberry Pi and MicroPython/CircuitPython spheres, so there's an easy road into SBCs and microcontrollers.
Education has already chosen Python as the preferred language for this sort of thing. It has some unfortunate bits, but it's certainly a more ergonomic language than BASIC. Counting tabs is less arduous than messing with line numbers and GOSUB.
These are actually how I first learned to program, but around 2001-2002, when I was about ten years old. I found a couple of them at the library, and that's when I realized it was something you could just learn...but lacked a BASIC interpreter.
I ended up also finding a No Starch Press book on JavaScript, and porting the BASIC listings to ye olde pre-Node JavaScript as my first foray into programming.
Then I also got a Commodore 64 on eBay some time later.
That’s super cool. I’m actually surprised if you had a PC in 2001 that it didn’t have QBASIC on it though. I think that was being shipped with Windows at least through Windows 98.
But of course, your solution to that was twice as good for your education than if you’d learned only BASIC so that’s good.
My experience was kind of similar except I was learning in the mid 90s and only had access to various flavors of BASIC, because all the computers my school had were from 1980-1987 or so. When I saw modern GUI computers though, I couldn’t understand how what I’d learned in the character-based world could be applied to the GUI paradigm, so I gave up on programming until the Web and PHP gave me a usable mental model to get back into it.
Internet resources weren't amazing back then (and, of course, still dial up at home until around 2005) so I didn't know QBASIC existed at first. We were on to Windows XP by then, which I don't believe included it, but our old '98 box would have had it.
I think I did also get my hands on a free version of Liberty BASIC from another book at one point, because it was on an included CD-ROM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_BASIC
I also moved into the Web sphere, because of course there were HTML books and I was already looking at JavaScript. I ended up picking up PHP for awhile, then eventually got into Java (especially after Minecraft was on the scene) and that has served me well career-wise.
It was similar for me, a little later in the '00s. I didn't have access to any computers at the time, BASIC interpreter or otherwise. Some years later I got access to Visual Basic on the family computer which unfortunately had very little in common!
If my school's library had had Machine Code for Beginners, my career might have been very different. (I'm actually a bit annoyed; I didn't know that existed).
> If my school's library had had Machine Code for Beginners, my career might have been very different. (I'm actually a bit annoyed; I didn't know that existed).
It's actually very good. I remember reading it at age 11 or so, and coming away knowing much more low-level stuff about computers than even the 18yo in the final year of school who were literally studying the stuff.
Things like "each instruction is a number", and registers like the PC, overflow, etc.
I went through a period (and a forest of pages) trying to write an entire game in machine code alone (with a small basic shim to load it).
Same with me. As a 12yr old I failed learning Z80 on my spectrum with the one book I could find. I had a bunch of other Usborne BASIC books, but their machine code book(s) would've been the link I needed to bridge the gap to where I could understand other material.
I had the same experience in the mid 90s. We had a computer lab with windows 98 and VB was around but all the library books were for qbasic and older things. Luckily 98 did have qbasic installed so I was able to use the code.
I then asked my dad for a book on C++. While I managed to make a few things, I distinctly remember getting lost at the concept of the "this" pointer. I really gained programming competency when I discovered python a few years after this. Teenage years I spent most of my time playing with HTML and trying to understand what the heck dynamic HTML was.
I'm trying replicate that path with my kid. We just got him a C64 ultimate (replica of the original highly recommend commodore.net) and these books are perfect for him to toy around with.
The ones I've seen from PayPal are basically from sending a large request for money to you, then in the freeform text field for the reason, putting fake "if you believe this is a scam, call [actually a scam number]" text.
I can confirm. Interestingly they actually put a random USDC transaction number from Coinbase which was very close (close enough that I thought it was accurate) of a transaction I actually did on Coinbase at one point. I was so confused so I ended up calling the number but immediately realized once they picked up what was going on. Essentially they got really lucky that my actual transaction amount was close enough to seem plausible.
This is a failure on PayPal’s email template that the freeform text field appears just as legit as other items. The text label was something like “Message from Sender”.
> This is a failure on PayPal’s email template that the freeform text field appears just as legit as other items.
This is a somewhat common pattern in scams - abusing freeform text fields in emails or other messages to give the impression that a message is coming from a source that didn't intend to send it.
Another variant I've seen is malicious URLs linking to search engines which display the user's search terms, e.g. a link to a Microsoft site search with a prefilled search of "YOU HAVE A VIRUS, CALL MICROSOFT SUPPORT 555-1212".
Since some people seem to have missed it: the final Discworld book, and Pratchett's deliberate "signing off," is the last Tiffany Aching book (The Shepherd's Crown), not Raising Steam.
I can't really say much about the central theme without giving away a disc-shaking change to the world, because it's about that event and the next generation (Tiffany) carrying on. It's a very sad story, but also meant to be encouraging, and clearly intended to be his last book.
That is accurate. Acura and Lexus were brands created for the US market. The original Integra was badged as Honda in Japan and Acura in the US, for example. A TLX or whatever is just a top trim Accord.
Yep. Growing up in the 90s, Japan was the undisputed king of cool, affordable entry level sports cars. RX-7, Integra, Impreza WRX, et al.
Yamaha, Korg an Roland were the defining instrument producers of the 80s and 90s. Few things have altered the course of popular music as much as the TR-909 and TR-808, M1, DX-7, Juno, Jupiter. All of electronic music grew out of those.
The Walkman and Discman were iconic.
Honda was building P3 and ASIMO. The PlayStation 1/2 and Nintendo 64/GameCube were a thing.
I didn't even get into anime, the language or music from there until decades later. But all of the cool things came from Japan back then. Honestly, they still kind of do.
As the owner of a Juno 106, I can't disagree. In the 90's, to me, it was Panasonic video gear that I found amazing. Had to take apart a couple of toughbooks tonight, and they are great little machines.
Although, to me, what I've always loved about Japan is how they will take every medium that arrives on the scene and treat it with loving craftsmanship. From jazz to skateboarding to yo-yos.
Exactly. There's a lot of value placed on expert craftsmanship or just...being an extreme nerd about some niche thing, as well as on the act of creating things. Whatever you're interested in, there's some random person in Japan who's really good at it.
It resonates with me, because I get uncomfortable if I do too much passive consumption and am not making something.
With the cost of the bespoke glass, damage to it basically means the car is guaranteed to be totaled even in a less extreme scenario.
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