Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48442247

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

Um, no.

I daresay you could find the odd example, as for any grid in a stressed situation, but it's not like we turn to each other every week in the dark and say "Oh, it must be half time at the Manchester United match".

My endearing memory is calling the company in Edinburgh for technical support, to be greeted on the phone by a lady with a lovely, cheery Scottish accent announcing "Aldus UK".

Fun fact: I was first person in the UK to print in colour on an HP ink jet printer at the trade show where they were first demonstrated. The HP folks hadn't got the official colour driver ready for the show, so the HP guys were printing in mono, but I'd had an advanced model to try and hacked some other print driver to work with it.

I understand that this is because you have to disassemble / un-glue the phones through the front and remove the display. For this reason, the repair shops I have asked have said they don't 'do' Motorola phones because there's too much risk in breaking the display.

This effectively means that the life of the phone is determined by the ageing of the battery.

After the fact, when I moved more in to systems and networking, I found that flat, nylon, waxed lacing cord, with a small nut tied to the end, was lightweight and perfect for throwing through ducting and ceiling spaces very long distances, so you could backhaul cables through the void. It was a real time saver.

I also had a 'faulty' Olivetti inkjet printer that was written off under warranty with a mysterious fault. I eventually managed to fix it by bending the metal paper detector arm so that it slotted properly into the optical sensor - it was a little out of whack and the sensor sometimes couldn't work out whether there was paper in the tray.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46440907

Points: 16

# Comments: 2

I'm out of that game now though so don't have the challenge.

https://www.centreon.com/

I used to work in a building next to a B&W place where they either made speakers or at least the drive units. The day was punctuated regularly by rather loud audio frequency sweeps!

With AI we need fewer programmers, and the juniors will possibly be the first to go, but they might me retrained for other careers (which might eventually get cancelled too because of AI), or out of work.

The software they produced did something - it might have been a CRM or a game, but out of work people might have to cut back on their gaming spend. As for the CRM app business, the customers and potential software customers are also cutting back in staff, and the CRM apps will be able to conduct direct B2B negotiations with client CRMs, so there's no job opportunities there, and so more people are out of work. Perhaps the businesses that used the AI-based B2B and B2C CRM and ERP systems won't be needed any more, or not have a viable customer base, too.

Other industries are replacing folks with 'AI', so the unemployment pool is getting larger. This means the luxury and non-vital goods manufacturers will have less revenue and they are laying off staff so there's some compensation there, but eventually not enough for survival - which is 'fine' because AI is replacing all this stuff.

This snowballs into other industries, leaving just those jobs that can be done more easily by a human, but those jobs will also reduce as AI and surrounding robotics etc improve, so what do all these unemployed people do all day. Some will embrace leisure activities that don't break the bank. Some may volunteer for community work or projects to improve the World, but they still need to eat and pay bills - who's going to help with that?

One solution might be a 'Star Trek' economy not based on work for reward, but that's a big cultural shift that people and governments will struggle massively to get their heads around conceptually.

There will also be powerful resistance to such a radical rebasing of the planet-wide financial model, especially by those people and organisations that have amassed wealth and don't want to give it up. They'll even fight back with lobbying and arguments against change while they're getting replaced with AI.

Or...?

Yep, some personalities on Digg had their groupies and if they posted something, all their followers would vote it up the listing, in effect the post was influenced.

That's when I bailed because genuinely interesting stuff not posted by the 'right' people had no chance of exposure.

Official dealers won't service it or will keep resetting it...

As a schoolboy I was one of a handful who were in the computer club. We had a CBM (PET) 3016, a few Acorn System Ones and a UK101 that was built by our physics teacher.

One day this big grey prototyping keyboard case turned up. There was a microcassette unit fitted for loading and saving programs, and the whole thing was connected to a colour TV via an umbilical cord that looked like a vacuum cleaner hose.

We were given task sheets with projects to complete on this unit, and we could control the TV from the keyboard, read Teletext pages AND download programs.

It was a fun piece of kit that stayed with us for a couple of months.

In hindsight, I realised that the unit was a pre-production BBC Micro and we'd been part of a pre-launch test programme thanks to that same physics teacher.