Cool. After all these years, we finally have an example that answers 'But can it run Doom' with a clear No.

Afaik, voxel means something like volume element, (cfr pixel as picture elemen, with x for coolness). As every column is a 3D box in this rendering method, I have no issue with describing it as a 2x2 matrix of voxels.

Gwbasic and later qbasic were delivered with MS-DOS

Yeah, but beyond the learning to program steps, it was about time to acquire programming environments for Quick/Turbo Pascal, NASM/TASM, Turbo/Quick Basic, Clipper DBase,... by whatever means, and the same for the knowledge how to use them, on an offline first world.

And for this, one had to be curious, track down people with knowledge, either from computer magazines ads, hanging around electronic stores, eventually find people with similar interests, to meet them physically.

There are other paths.

In my case, I had no access to software from other people, but the library had tons of old books for programming all kinds of computers in mistly basic. So first I learned translating commodore etc to gwbasic. The peek and poke gave a trapdoor to assembly, which granted e.g. mouse access. After I managed to install gwbasic as a TSR, I realized I basically had hollowed out the interpretrr, and started writing straight in debug.com. It took 3 years before I discovered MIX C in a dusty corner of a bookshop. It cost a fortune for this kid, and frequently miscompiled things, but it was one of the first pieces of software I got that didn't come with the computer.

Exactly this. In Spain, 90's gaming was either the Game Boy or the Play Station, and PS2 in early 00's. Computers were for offices and most people began to use them at libraries and in early 00's, tons of people had a PC at home but download stuff from cybercafes. Getting developer stuff from magazines was mandatory, but these were pretty expensive and the materials sucked a lot.

They also provide coordination and legalisation of collusion.

That a firm like them even exists is symptomatic of greater systemic design flaws.

We should confront these flaws else not be surprised when endless games of corruption whac-a-mole keeps things unchanged.

Ffs, we're approaching 2025 and are still rooted in a primitive consumption-based economy which views any alternative to it as an existential threat, when in fact it is the existential threat.

"Many only consider the negatives of euthanizing those too old to work, however our model suggests..."

How did idiv work on the pentium. Was it also optimized, or somehow connected to fdiv, or just the old slow algorithm?

Do you know why USA radio systems are all named Kxxx or Wxxx? Some kind of code assigned by the governement?

It's a radio callsign (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_signs_in_the_United_State...)

> The FCC policy covering broadcasting stations limits them to call signs that start with a "K" or a "W", with "K" call signs generally reserved for stations west of the Mississippi River, and "W" limited to stations east of the river.

This is a relatively new invention as well. When radio first started in the US (late 1890s), callsigns were arbitrary. I believe the Kxxx and Wxxx divide started in the 1920s. Also, this callsign convention applies for TV broadcast as well.

OK thanks. That's cool. Presumably our local radio stations also have them, even if I can't find them with a quick duckduckgoogle.

I'd love all participants in this thread to provide their countries.

As a Belgian (EU), I love how I can pay them just by sending them money, without all these weird intermediate companies stealing your personal details and sometimes even your money.

To answer some contras:

In my experience, the process takes about 10 seconds before the payment confirmation appears in the destination bank. Outside business hours and for some bank combinations, the actual money might be in a reservation/underway/unspendable state until the next business day starts. You can not cancel the transfer once it's gone, so most businesses don't care about that delay.

Typing the IBAN is a tiny bit annoying. I see QR codes appearing, containing bic+iban+amount+message to autofill. You pay by scanning the QR code and pressing OK.

AFAIK bic+iban+amount+message is all you need to pay from anywhere in the world. The BIC can be derived from the IBAN if you have the right and up to date database, but outside the EU it is smart to know it, just to be sure.

Sometimes, reading HN, I wonder if I should write a loooong blog post about how Belgium does its money transfers(iban) and buys bread (Bancontact). I suspect most of the EU will answer: duh, boring! Meanwhile, the average USAian brain goes poof.

10 seconds in a German bank? You must be joking, it still takes days.

Speaking as a linux addict from the 90s: The NT kernel was great. The windows GDI and USER were reasonable but a bit warty, and not fully up to date for current graphics works. COM as interoperability protocol was quite good. The windows UI from 95 to win2k was also great.

Really apart from the lack of unix shell like automation and some serious security holes, this was a good system. Unfortunately, starting with XP, the end user was not Microsoft's center of attention anymore, and the OS gets worse every new version since.

I am wondering about those birthday cards with a tiny speaker, battery and mystery blob of epoxy built in. Do we have any idea what's inside and if it can be reprogrammed. That would be a great target for this kind of build.

A few weeks ago, I was using my mothers PC. Google was erroneously in French, and no language chooser available. So I checked. Firefox sent a HTTP header with a Dutch preference. She was logged in with her Google account, which had a Dutch language preference. Some geolocation providers put her in Dutch speaking cities of Belgium. Still, the Google Algorithm had decided she would speak French. Plenty of other sites make similar errors, especially the biggest ones

So I wonder: Why are we sending out all this info. Fingerprinting is the only actual use. The number of sites using it as it should is minimal. Lets just stop giving it. They don't need a list of audio or video devices. They don't need my installed fonts. They don't believe my language settings when I whack them over the head with it. Let's just fill in defaults everywhere. Maybe provide a whitelist for legitimate sites.

Sites preferring geolocation over Accept-Language as a means of picking the language is one of my pet peeves. Preferring geolocation over a logged in user's stored setting is beyond absurd.

With weirdly sticky behavior too once you’ve left that area. My google sign in prompt was in Italian for over a decade after logging in there once on a family vacation. Only with the latest login revamp did that setting finally get purged. Everything else was always english, profile set to english etc.

I’ve just had an issue where my google searches were stuck defaulting to Sydney, Australia after being there for one week.

I think that is a pretty safe assumption from Google. People die trying to leave Sydney.

There's a trend in commercial software where folks keep adding epicycles on epicycles, often based on barely stat-sig wins in A/B tests, to the point of systems becoming completely impenetrable. I bet this was a result of that.

This was so annoying when visiting Poland recently. I don't speak Polish.

Even after setting my preferred language on my Google account, Google Search was still speaking Polish to me.

Ha, I even started to receive spam mail in Polish (kind of "we got your webcam, give us money"). They're clearly using the collected data and are subject to the same problems.

Wait, how would that work for scammers?

Scammers can also buy aggregate information, just like advertisers

Prime video is amazing for this; in Germany but only dubs available? Admit defeat that the orig audio is somehow not available but not even English subtitles?!

With video I think that it’s sometimes a licensing thing. As in, the streaming service licenses subtitles from a third party and the rights are limited to specific countries.

Same in Spain. Often only the Spanish dubbed audio is available making the content useless to me.

With the increase in ads on streaming platforms I've just reverted back to piracy. The enshittification has gone too far.

That's a weird one. It's common for people to prefer the original audio, and most Germans understand English.

Germany has a very strong culture of dubbing essentially everything. Just finding any showing of a film in its original language at a cinema is very difficult outside of major cities for example.

Same in the Netherlands. It gave me everything in Dutch, even after I logged in.

Agreed. I live in Finland, but my preferred language is English. Many many sites send me Finnish by default, although Google directions will always be in Swedish.

I seem to have to "change results to English" on google searches at least once a week when it forgets which language I've setup and used for the past ten years!

Now that google is offering translated Reddit posts my flow on my iPhone when I google something is

Google -> Reddit -> open translated post in app -> share in app with browser again -> click on show original.

I’ve never ever let any involved websites actually use my native language. Neither Google nor Reddit.

If you set the language to something that isn't the default anywhere, and isn't standard for your country (so for you, English followed by Danish would do) Google seems to respect the preference.

But you add a lot of entropy to the privacy violators.

And geolocation is often wrong. Half of IP locators locate my VPS in one country, a quarter in another country, 1000 miles away, and another quarter in a third country, 1000 miles away from the first two.

When you think that 90% of browsing devices are phones or laptops… beyond any possible comprehension

Selecting a locale based solely on geolocation is absurd, and the reverse is equally true. Just because you prefer a specific locale doesn't mean you're physically in that country. Unfortunately, I encounter this anti-pattern far too often.

Yeah I live in Spain but don't speak the language so well. It's super frustrating when I get redirected to Spanish versions of sites. Sometimes they even redirect me back to Spanish after I deliberately choose English.

Netflix used to offer Audio and Subtitles in several languages. Now even subtitles the only option I get is Spanish (Latin America)... Like come on, sometimes I want to learn another language, understand the real word behind the sounds.

I may understand Audio, because of Edge location storage costs, but Subtitles... that’s blasphemy.

One time, I set a self-checkout machine to French to immerse myself in French training in Canada. This happened to set the payment terminal to French as well, which must have set a bit in the on-card chip.

Now, all my pay-at-the-pump interactions at gas stations are all in French. A website I was purchasing from flipped to French when I entered my card info. There were a few surprise interactions where my language preference was clearly derived from my bank card setting.

I’m just hoping that being classed as bilingual is doing wonders for my “social” score at some clandestine data clearinghouse.

A while ago a LinkedIn request from a Chinese person hit my inbox. I reluctantly pressed Accept Connection (in the email) only to find out that my LinkedIn language setting had changed to Chinese.

Now, I don't speak or read Chinese and couldn't immediately find a way to change the setting back to English. Could probably find it on the internet but .. Oh well, I don't really use LinkedIn so it's just stayed that way now.

That is some genius move by LinkedIn...

I can understand it if someone's sending out something like a Google Doc collaboration invite, especially to a non-GMail address, the email will be in the Google Docs UI language of the sender. But LinkedIn has your profile with all your preferences!

What next, a colleague shares the link to a location, you open it in your car, and your car UI turns into Chinese?

Funny, my friend in Wallonia complains about the opposite, he wants Google in French and gets it in Dutch.

I struggle with this often, but http://www.google.com/ncr does the trick and allow to choose the language later if necessary.

Yes. The browser innocently gives away tons of information for surveillance capitalism corporations to leech.

It is a if the web and browser developers lived in an innocent world

The largest browser is owned by a surveillance firm

Why anyone would use Chrome blows my mind a bit. Brave is a superior browser in every single aspect of a browser and as of rn - you do not see ads on the Internet.

It's such a no brainer, I can't comprehend it.

Brave is still Chrome, you’re just kidding yourself.

Because Brave is just trying to build their own ad-network under the guise of being "privacy" oriented. It is a conflict of interest trying to get profitable selling user data while also claiming to block it. When first installed the their own ad and crypto stuff is enabled-by-default. Then throw in a few nefarious incidents, such as the affiliate link-hijacks a few years ago, and it is hard to trust them.

No browser is safe from capitalistic rot at this point.

Ads in and of themselves don't mean a browser isn't privacy-focused. In fact the most privacy focused one I can think of, Duckduckgo, is monetized by ads. All of Duckduckgo is. They're just not personalized.

I use Ungoogled Chromium (download from Github) that has all the tracking code removed. Only downside is updates are not automatic but otherwise runs flawlessly.

Are you OK with Brave using Chromium as their base?

Yes but chrome has not created new user tracking standards. Every web browser leaks a lot of information

I want everything, everywhere be always in english by default unless I explicitly set another language or there is no english version at all. Even if it's my native language and I'm in my home country

You do realize that the fact of paying for any service makes your usage perfectly attributable to real identity, don't you. Something that Google needed to work hard to infer with some level of certainty you actually pay for. And I'd only have so much trust in promises of respecting your privacy given by any business. Everything that can be sold is for sale, event if this meant that it could not longer claim to "do no evil".

I use kagi for a search engine.

Paying for a search engine means that I am the customer, not the product. While you are correct that my data is an asset for Kagi, it is a one shot asset, vs my subscription, which is recurring revenue.

I can look at the privacy policy for Kagi (https://kagi.com/privacy), and see that I am not at risk of having my searches logged or data shared. I trust them because violating that privacy policy puts them at risk of being sued by me, and by any investors in the company.

As you yourself stated: either company is capable of building a profile. One has promised not to do that contractually, and google, more or less, has promised to do exactly that regardless.

I still see stuff in Spanish on my phone and have not yet figured out how to reset it. Talking about Google updates like calendar, weather

It would be nice if Google actually used the preferred language. They don't give a shit. I'm still getting maps and other stuff in local language based on IP.

I logged in on deployment in the Middle East, and still have Google randomly swap over to Arabic in search and on YouTube. It has been over a decade and a half (since I was there), and I've never once tried to do any browsing in anything but English. To even drive this incompetence further, I was Navy so I have under two weeks time total of be logged in.

Frankly for a company that's a Spyware company, they sure are incompetent.

So true. It's funny how the article mentioned "privacy enhancing technologies" - how about instead, we get rid of the disgustingly huge quantity of technology devoted to removing our privacy?!