Forums existed when everyone had a 1024x800 computer monitor on his desk, before mobile Webbrowsers where a thing. The layout did make sense at the time.

You underestimate how affordable or accessible a computer was in the eastern block. For reference, a color tv that is “mass produced” and didn’t need much expensive high tech parts would cost as much as you would earn in one year - if you manage to find one in a shop.

For a computer you needed to find keyboard, drive, monitor, software and the computer itself which would be at least equally expensive to a color tv.

All the chips had to be manufactured locally in the eastern block, because there was an embargo on western computer tech. RAM alone was 10x more expensive because the manufacturing process was very inefficient.

It’s almost as if car manufacturers and big oil write the laws to increase their own profit margins…

No, they just didn’t kill enough whistleblowers…

a set of only 9 characters

🤔

OCR existed long before the 486. AFAIK it was already used in the 70’s or 80’s to scan mail and presort them based on the postcode. I remember that postcards had light orange boxes (presumably because this color was invisible to B/W scanners?) with dots inside where you where supposed to write the postcode numbers in.

There are some apps that allow you to use your phone as a webcam, either via USB or wifi.

ChatGPT can recognize text on images already.

That are some good points, i didnt really hear about deepmind for a long time and forgot about it. But replacing google websearch with “AI” really sounds like a decision made by marketing department, where they dont understand their own product, their customers or the techs limitations.

Unless of course they want to remove/hide all outgoing links from google search, so the user will spend more time there and google has more opportunities to show them ads from their own ad network, instead of losing the visitors to another website…

Results might be very different if you are inside china, or write in Chinese characters.

Baidu, please tell me about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.

Wow, in the 2000’s and 2010’s google my impression was that this is an amazing company where brilliant people work to solve big problems to make the world a better place. In the last 10 years, all I was hoping for was that they would just stop making their products (search, YouTube) worse.

Now they just blindly riding the AI hype train, because “everyone else is doing AI”.

Trust me, it will go up in value… In 2070.

The 200hp engine to move the metal box at a speed of 15 kmh in city traffic from one red light to the next…

Well, you can have a lot of space for casinos, shops and pools with waterslides on a cruise ship to entertain passengers because weight is not important. But on an airship…?

While i would love to travel by airship, I dont think there would be a commercial success in airship passenger travel in the near future:

• travel times of multiple days means you probably need 2-3x the crew, compared with a plane on a 8h flight
• this also means a plane that is 4x as fast can make the same trip 4x more often, bringing in more money for the airline in the same amount of time
• you probably can’t land on existing airports, because an airship the size of a large building would be crawling accross your airspace blocking all flight traffic, or shaken by the turbulences behind a large jet powered airliner
• new technology without any existing infrastructure is much more expensive than building on top of existing things
• tickets would be much more expensive than a commercial plane because of the reasons above, the lower passenger capacity and the fact that you have to carry more supplies (water + food for days multiplied by people on board) for a longer trip. Each passenger with cabin and supplies was calculated as 300kg weight on a transatlantic flight on the hindenburg
• Hindenburg could not fly in a direct straight line, because it travels at a height of only 400-600m. This means you had to go around high mountain ranges, because people and the combustion engines need oxygen which you dont have much above 4000m. However i dont know if this is still a problem with modern pressurized cabins, or if there is another limitation from the lifting gas…

Only if they have a killer app that people are willing to pay for…

I think you do need some central server, and then check if a lot of users report certain number blocks for spam in a short amount of time. No need for AI on this one. Isn’t that how most phone spam blockers work?

I still remember that in the 90s till the 2000s you would get maybe 60 to 90 minutes of battery life out of a new laptop. Then it jumped to 4 or more hours thanks to better batteries, more energy efficient CPUs and displays.

You know what we don’t have? Bears. Alligators. Cougars. Wolves.

Because they all got killed by box jellyfish, venomous spiders or drop bears!