Ahh, yeah, I stand corrected. Sleeves were gone from the Thinkpads earlier than I thought.

This is a good suggestion. That generation of ThinkPad keyboards wasn’t the No-travel scissor switch nonsense that most laptop keyboards now anyway. It was IBM buckling sleeve technology, and a low profile tactile switch with similarly low-pro keys would probably be about the closest thing to its feel.

it would make a good excuse to skip the trip and stay home like I wanted to do in the first place.

This, LOL. My credulity is inversely proportional to how badly I want to go on this trip.

maybe a bead from a dessicant packet? They’re usually more clear, but can sometimes drift towards brown.

One of my friends had one and they always did the same. I don’t think any computer has ever seen its power intentionally turned off as often as the Commodore 128.

First one I used was an Apple II at school. First I used outside of school was my buddy’s Laser Apple II clone. First one I owned was an Atari XEGS, with the caveat that we didn’t get the disk drive, so all programs had to be typed in when I wasn’t playing Bug Zapper or Missile Command or failing to learn how to play Flight Simulator 2. Still learned a lot of Atari BASIC.

Eventually we got a Tandy RSX with DOS 5.0 and “Tandy Deskmate”

These idiots would vote for him again anyway.

I don’t know Kennet, MO specifically, but this is my thought every time I read one of these stories. I guess we’ll (probably) find out in 18 months.

Not immune, but let’s say resistant. Due to federation, they couldn’t lock down existing federated content; due to open source they couldn’t lock down the user experience; and due to those two, nobody’s going to offer them a check for a couple million dollars.

There is test-taking software that locks out all other functions during the essay-writing period. Obviously, damn near anything is hackable, but it’s non-trivial, unlike asking ChatGPT to write your essay for you in the style of a B+ high student. There is some concern about students who learn differently or compose less efficiently, but as father to such a student, I’m still getting to the point where I’m not sure what’s left to do other than sandbox “exploitable” graded work in a controlled environment.

I guess there is a Ford F-350 chassis under all the train shit and somehow it’s street legal. I also read that the stretch of highway where it happened is poorly designed, and it’s completely possible that a overcorrecting to avoid something in the road could lead a large vehicle to jump the very narrow median.

If you traveled to the 800s England, you wouldn’t understand the English they would speak.

Yup. You could probably go back to the late 1300s and get a grasp within weeks instead of months, at least in the southern half of England, and it would get easier with each passing decade, but you’d probably have to drop in a couple of generations after Shakespeare to be sure of being mostly functional on Day One.

No, that’s beta.

‘Butter’ is hitting something a lot.

this tendency in the past decade to base entire shows on tense anxiety.

Yup. I call it the “drama of paranoia,” and it’s exhausting after a while. It also gives you a veneer of “prestige” without having to make characters I give a shit about or plots that fit together at all. As a good example of a show that realized this, Mad Men always struggled with a certain early-season plotline until they finally just ripped off the band-aid and said,

What worked about that show had nothing to do with “ONE BIG SECRET.”

Same. I was adopted as an infant, and I actually used all the DNA sites to triangulate my birth family (some nice folks, some asses). I did it over ten years ago, but it would have been a lot easier today. I think it hits a lot of people, especially on a platform like Lemmy, in their Sci-Fi dystopia feels in an inchoate kind of way that makes them recoil, and it’s not that there isn’t any potential for abuse, just that this is a genie that’s very much out of the bottle. Frankly, if anything truly awful is going to be done with autosomal DNA, the people who want to do it will simply mandate it.

Records-wise, it’s a large universe and impressively interconnected. I’ve learned a lot about all of my families (birth, adopted, marriage), and I was able to track down the documentation necessary to support a successful application get an EU passport for my wife (her company paid for it once she told them it was plausible), and therefore our daughter. I gather that I’ll be eligible for one myself in the near future, as she was legally always a citizen, and therefore she will soon have been married for twenty years.

If my paternal side were more forthcoming, I might have been able to work something out with them for a couple of other countries, as my great-grandfather was an illegal immigrant from Germany who jumped ship from a freighter in the 1920s and married a girl whose family fled the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire after WWI. Then their kid married a Canadian nurse who was actually born in the “Dominion of Newfoundland” before confederation. Somehow this ended up creating Floridians… 🤷

Also, there’s a good chance your goony-ass yearbook photos are on Ancestry (among other places).

I do sometimes think there is a bit of hand-wringing that happens where people glom onto the most visible sign of changing times and blame it for things that probably aren’t as different as the adults think, but by the same token most schools in richer countries have screens everywhere with school-related interconnectivity and even tools that are not unlike social media.

I see very little downside here, even if it may not result in some magic rebirth of older forms of social interaction. It seems like the major benefit from the French pilot programs was “improved atmosphere,” in which case it’s still better than nothing. Having a period when kids are learning to deal with small-group dynamics is not a bad thing, and neither is taking “dealing with phone bullshit” off the teachers’ plates.

I mean… fine? France always does things kind of top-down and there’s certainly no reason you have to have your phone readily available, and plenty of evidence it’s good to be away from it.

It’s not like they need to get to their phones to tell their parents there’s an active shooter on campus. 😐

I’m never gonna financially emotionally recover from this!

I honestly forget who at this point, but I think a few people still believe that I met my wife during a brief educational stay in her home state, when in fact it was online and years later.

Agreed. Can we have this article taken off the internet? I don’t want it accessible from any of my connections.

“you get one pass”

LOL, I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re not wrong. I like that. 🤣

act white and straight

This is really what it comes down to. They don’t think of themselves as racist/sexist/homophobic because they don’t (all) reflexively reject someone because their innate characteristics. Instead, your obligation is to identify and adhere to certain cultural touchstones, political beliefs, and historical narratives. If you do that, then you don’t make them feel uncomfortable and you can be dissolved in their acid bath part of their melting pot. They’re also slightly more tolerant of people whom they code as weak or politically apathetic. Woe unto the person who thinks that you can be both different and assertive, though.