I think something like the Commodore PET might qualify. Back in the day, I saw it used for everything from cash registers to accountants' workstations, but rarely for anything else.

I think that the original IBM PC was conceived and marketed as a business machine and only grew beyond that because of Microsoft's deep commitment to it as a platform and IBM's uncharacteristicly open specifications and design.

If not for that combination, the PC might never have left the office and most of us would have stuck with the companies who were actually breaking new ground, Apple and Commodore.

Florida House Bill 1 would prohibit children under the age of 16 from using most social media platforms, regardless of parental approval.

The social media platforms the bill would target include any site that tracks user activity, allows children to upload content or uses addictive features designed to cause compulsive use.

How would this even work? Let's take a closer look at the first 2 clauses of the second paragraph:

A student portal for accessing lessons and submitting assignments would require tracking activity and uploading content. If that system is accessible to students or anyone else from anywhere other than direct connection to the school LAN, then it would be in contravention of this law.

Or let's say someone puts up a self-hosted, restricted-access system for extended family to stay in touch without using a commercial or public system (something I'm in the process of doing). Allowing teenagers to use that site would put them on the wrong side of the law.

Brain damaged authoritarian nut jobs...

Well, if you want "compile something unstable yourself," here is their official documentation for ARM64.

And here is someone's progress report on porting to RISC-V. They seem to have started in 2021, so maybe they were successful.

Whenever I price something, I look at the whole package. If I like what a company is doing, I don't mind paying extra to support them. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. With System76, I feel like I won.

They were the only company I found that was offering Canadians any laptop with Linux pre-installed. (I think Lenovo or Toshiba had something, but they weren't available in Canada.) Having fought mightily with various distros on a wide range of hardware for years, it was critically important that my new daily driver not suck up my time just getting it running and keeping it that way.

Nearly 5 years later, the laptop is still going strong. On top of that, my hopes for their distro have far exceeded any reasonable expectations. I was prepared for the likelihood that I would ultimately need to switch to another distro, but their ongoing development and contributions to the Linux ecosystem have kept me on board and excited for the future.

In the end, I wasn't buying a laptop. I was buying a system, and I've been extremely happy with the outcome.

That said, I suspect my next laptop will be a Framework. Again, it has less to do with the detailed specifics of hardware than in supporting a company in their attempt to do things the way I think they should be done.

To answer the question a bit more directly, I would guess that demographics here skew a bit older than elsewhere. That is just a guess, based on the fact that sdf.org dates back to 1987.

Two big ones. I bought the VIC-20 shortly after introduction when I was 21.

Big memory 1: writing machine language programs without the aid of an assembler. I couldn't afford the assembler cartridge, but I wanted to break out of the BASIC sandbox.

Big memory 2: finding a military surplus acoustic coupler modem and using the schematics to make my own connector, then writing a terminal program so I could dial in to these crazy things called BBSs.

I recently retired from the local volunteer fire and rescue service. Several years ago the 911 dispatch service wanted to drop paging for notifications and move to SMS. I wrote a nice little technical critique of that plan. In addition to the basic issues regarding coverage (many members have no cell service in their yards, never mind in the fields, yet pagers basically just work), I learned from my technical contacts at the telco that there were a number of service guarantee problems. In addition to the lost and delayed message problem you discovered, things only get worse when crossing providers. As he put it, it's not so much that it works so good most of the time, it's that it works at all.

Dispatch did go with SMS notifications, but as an add-on to pagers and "robocalls" to registered phone numbers. We tracked notification channels for several months and found that with every callout, at least one member would report getting the SMS at least 20 minutes later than the page or phone call. Note that most members can get to the hall in 20 minutes or less. A couple of times over the years, we got a flurry of SMS notifications after we were on scene.

Friends don't let friends use SMS for urgent or critical communications.

Thank you for sharing this! I've been looking for people who offer something other than hope, platitudes, and gentle transitions. Not because I'm suspicious of the "hopeful" position, or not only that, but to be fully informed on the issue of how to mobilize for concrete action.

I haven't read much of the relevant psychology, but my reading of history convinces me that humans don't act without an emergency. I see the challenge as being to help people understand that there is a real emergency, not a rhetorical one.

That, of course, is complicated by the fact that, in this case, the emergency isn't really visible until the time to act has passed. That means some consequences are now unavoidable, which is something that human nature has difficulty grappling with. As a result, it's very difficult to convince anyone, even those who are now living with some of those consequences, that the emergency can be anything other than rhetorical.

I agree. I have no idea what it takes to run publicly accessible services over the long haul. Hell, I can barely keep my sorry-ass website up!

I know that lemmy itself is pretty new, but I have to assume that the people who've been keeping SDF alive and functional for over 35 years know what they're doing.

There probably is, but I haven't found it yet. I realized pretty early in the game (in human lifespan terms) that our the solution was not to be found in technology but in the structure of society.

In the long view, technology has always advanced, sometimes in "pure" terms, sometimes in response to situations, and sometimes in service to one ideology or another. So there is a sense in which the technology takes care of itself.

What doesn't seem to take care of itself is society. It's my view that useful social structures are constructed in opposition to human nature. Individually, we are largely slaves to intuition and a variety of cognitive biases, not least of which is the difficulty of separating a sequence of events from a true causal chain. We tend to embrace ideology, which is about doing what we wish would work, rather than doing what does work.

The great projects of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution it engendered started paying clear and obvious social dividends following the Second World War in the wake of critically important foundational work done during the Great Depression. We were starting to make progress on global issues by the 1970s and then something derailed us.

I don't know what the underlying causes were, but it took only a couple of decades to turn the clock back, possibly as much as a century on some measures. One of the things that gives me hope is that maybe that quick reversal is evidence that we can do it again, but this time in a direction that makes things better.

For myself, I've all but dropped trying to address climate change directly (except in my own life) to focus on the larger project of social change. That is my nod to "long history" because I'm old enough that whatever happens to the climate and its impact on me are basically baked in. Thus I'm trying to do what I can to get people around me to start moving toward a more just, equitable, tolerant, evidence-based society.

I think you have a view of time and history that is quite rare. You seem to be using centuries as your unit of measure where very few people can get to even decades as the unit of measure. On your time scale, or larger ones up to and including evolutionary or geological time scales, it's relatively easy to conclude that "in the fullness of time" will "solve" the problem.

On ordinary time scales, where people look at the next 100 years at most, disaster is looming. That loss of life, major economic depression, and those wars you seem to shrug off as "business as usual" is exactly what is fueling their anxiety. Many of those people would say that your "fullness of time" view is actually a big part of the problem because it looks like complacency and can in fact foster complacency.

On top of that, few people do anything other than linear extrapolation based on recent data. So where you see little blips on a trend line, they see a continuation to infinity of whatever seems to be happening now.

And, of course, there are even people like me, who think that it takes coordinated effort at all scales from individual behaviour to the creation and honouring of global treaties to solve the problem. We already have plenty of those practical people you speak of and we now know that they are all but useless unless we can all agree join them. And we haven't and aren't. In that view the tipping point was c. 1980 and we're now so far over the cliff that the creation of the right kind of society now looks like a pipe dream. Which means that only a "black swan" event or technology can save the day. Hardly the stuff of optimism.

I think that the test systems I helped set up for my clients made it pretty obvious that they would have run into a variety of problems had we not done something. Most issues would not have been business ending, but there were a couple that would have made life quite interesting for a few months.

Preventative action is always tough to justify, because it always looks unnecessary when it works.