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I still have my dads old HP with the glowing red letters and all the functions. Not sure if we still have the charger. Not sure the battery is any good, but the calculator worked fine last time it was turned on decades ago. Any idea if this can be made to function again?

Yes probably. What model is it? I repair and restore old HP calculators. One thin about all the models from 1972 through the early 1980s that use a battery pack - do not power the calculator off the adaptor alone - these models used a working battery pack as part of the adaptor voltage "regulation" - if you power off the adaptor without the battery a much higher voltage will get into the calulator and can permanently damage it. If you dont have a working battery pack, the only way to test it is with a bench power supply set to a safe voltage. For many of these models I install a lithium battery system and USB-C charge port so we no longer have to mess around with old leaky batteries and HP's poor implementation for charging them. Some of the models that are like this are: 35, 45, 55, 65, 67, the 20-series (21, 22, 25 etc) and the 30-series (31E, 32E, 33E, 33C, 34C etc). After these, the "Pioneers" came out (11C, 15C etc) which dont use a power adaptor and are safe.

>> In addition, we are unable to directly update our analysis using the previous approach given the complexity of using USASpending.gov and SF133 report data from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to update from foreignassistance.gov because ID codes do not match up.

They can't really tie the cuts to actually useful programs. That was a big reason for the cuts.


>> The current commercialization isn't economically sustainable.

And if it were, and the result were like Elon and Scam Altman say it would destroy the economy. Not sure any country wants to lead the race to self destruction.


>> While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice. Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission.

IANAL but if you give your co-worker a copy to run, you've just used the OSS license to be able to do that right? The co-worker now has legal rights granted by the license right? Including to redistribute your changes?

This all seems really silly since pushing changes upstream is by far the best way to be sure the changes are maintained. Not to mention legal uncertainty around maintaining an internal proprietary fork.


>> In a more phonemic writing system, if you can read, you can read any unfamiliar word too.

You mean pronounce the word. Reading is supposed to include comprehension.


No, comprehension is again orthogonal to reading as it is needed in spoken language too. Remember: everybody's (unless you have a severe speech or hearing impairment as a baby) first language is a spoken language, and to extend it to a written language you will have to learn (be taught) an artificial orthography to map to and from. You can know a lot of vocabulary before learning to read (if you ever do). In a language with a phonemic writing system, your sets of spoken and written vocabulary are the same, whereas in English they only overlap. In both cases, knowing a word is orthogonal to knowing its meaning(s).

The reason they have to put all that crap in the title bar is because of all the other bad UI decisions that used up all the screen space.

Apparently Cosmic will even let you combine different apps in the same tab group. I read that but haven't confirmed.

Web browsers had to innovate because OSes, DEs and GUI toolkits stagnated. Tabs and better sandboxing came from web the browser.


>> You have to maximize most windows to get it to show enough information.

At work I use 1 or 2 monitors plus the laptop screen (on Windows). At home I just use a single 55" 4K TV for my monitor and place apps center, left, right, and up top for rarely used stuff (on Linux). The desktop metaphor always wanted a big display but you're right - most Windows apps expect a full 1920x1080 for themselves.


>> We used to say that (not long ago, even) about the code-writing part. Why do we believe that LLMs are going to stop there? Why do we think they won't soon be able to talk to people, listen, and determine what they need?

Because they are currently "generative AI" meaning... autocomplete. They generate stuff but fall down at thinking and problem solving. There is talk of "reasoning models" but I think that's just clever meta-programming with LLMs. I can't say AI won't take that next step, but I think it will take another breakthrough on the order of transformers or attention. Companies are currently too busy exploiting the local maxima of LLMs.


> Companies are currently too busy exploiting the local maxima of LLMs

I get the feeling we can already spot the next AI Winter. Which is okay, we need a breather, and the current technology is useful enough on its own.


Wealth management guy discovers the hedonic treadmill.

Yeah, the article basically just defines lifestyle creep, which has been a common term for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_creep

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