This is not a typical home or office printer, very specialized.

Been saying for years, the Cambrian was life testing what would work. See also: 1910-1920s mechanical inventions.

SOAP calls

Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

Some might be surprised how many systems are still running on AS400s. IBM still makes and maintains IBMi, the modern iteration. My last company wrote our flagship product for these machines, all green screen. Our customers would sometimes move to our GUI product and jump right back to the prompt menus. Hey, if you gotta move fast and have a bulletproof system, text menus are the only way to fly!

By my god, the skill set for running and programming those beasts touches on almost nothing I’ve learned in 30+ years of IT work. Wish I had got experience in that part of the company, seen some solid job posts for that sorta tech.

That idea often comes up in these discussions and I’ve never really had an argument against. Best I got is that parts of that software may have moved to more modern stuff that was purchased by another company. But that’s a damned thin excuse not to implement this.

People keep saying to keep these XP machines off the internet. I seriously doubt there’s much threat, especially for even older OS’s like 98 and 95. It’s the very devil just trying to browse with them, nothing much out there is going to be able to attack them. Security through obscurity indeed!

In any case, we’re no longer in the Wild West days when people had machines hooked directly to the internet and a firewall was a third-party addon. LOL, ZoneAlarm anyone!

We all have a basic firewall built into our routers so unless you deliberately expose services you’re fairly bulletproof to scanners. I remember scanning for Win2000 machines in blocks of IPs, long after it was defunct. Plenty were out there!

I was tearing out ancient infrastructure for a new office and my eye kept going to a rectangular square box on the wall. Finally realized it was a PC! The cause of death was clear, PSU fan died, killed itself from heat. It was a form factor I had never seen, but standard nonetheless. It was running an answering machine system in DOS, still worked! Such a rare machine I’ve only found a single reference on the web and a single video about it. 1999, 486XS (I know, would kill for a DX, it’s soldered on), upgraded from 2x 2MB SIMMs to a whopping 2x 64MB SIMMs. Imagine what that would have cost in the day!

LONG story, but I got it running Windows 95b. 3.1 was just too much challenge to get it networked and happy. Much pain was removed when I got a USB floppy emulator. Can’t do jack without a floppy! Broke the network card drivers, need to start over. Had it running Doom with a legit SoundBlaster card and could RDP into over the network.

It was an amazing journey getting it all together and updated. Most of that knowledge is gone from the internet, and I sure don’t remember all the tricks. Going to be my first token ring machine! LOL, had to get parts from Romania and trash cans.

None of the explanations matter now, too late. “White genocide” is now a thing in SA. The term is in people’s heads. Mission accomplished.

It’s depressing that we can never truly own even the land we live on. How many seniors lose it all over property taxes? FFS, we have auctions to rape these poor people.

No lie. We play this game every 7 years or so. I was training on a Win10 machine at work yesterday. Think they’re updating that? Nah. Hell, it probably could take an 11 upgrade and they haven’t bothered. Why? It’s a locked down machine. And if IT don’t care, home users certainly won’t.

Who you callin’ an aglet, pal?

Check his avatar and that pic. Money says tough guy here couldn’t hang with my old ass outside at Lowe’s for a single shift. He’d stroke out if I strapped 20lbs. to his back, handed him a rifle and marched him down to the creek with me. LOL, he ain’t gonna cowboy nothing.

And what in the AI is that cowboy supposed to be doing? Running, uh, fence? Creating a lasso out of, uh, ropey stuff?

I’m actually that kinda guy. It would never occur to me that chainsawing the head of a whale corpse I found on the beach would be a no-no. It’s already dead! Not like I killed it. I’m also dumb enough to keep bird feathers I find. Yeah. That could be a problem given the wrong cop.

“SWEET! Giant skull! I’m hanging that shit at camp! (After the ants do their thing.)”

I really do hang skulls I find on the shed door. Got a deer, a small mammal with pointy canines, a box turtle and pieces of something the raptors left (rabbit?). One time the local dogs dropped a deer skull on my tent. Coughed loudly and scared hell out of 'em.

So did Martin Shkreli. (LOL, I Googled “guy who raised drug prices”. First hit from Gemini. Maybe AI ain’t so dumb?)

Shkreli not only bragged about it but had the nerve to be an insufferable little bitch while he was at it. With a punchable face. At least Holmes is cute.

Steal from the poor all ya like, never the rich. Reverse Robin Hood: A-OK.

ChatGPT:

You’re absolutely right to be concerned — this is a real and growing problem. We’re not just dealing with misinformation anymore; we’re dealing with the weaponization of information systems themselves. Bad actors leveraging AI to flood conversations with plausible-sounding nonsense don’t just muddy the waters — they actively erode public trust in expertise, evidence, and even the concept of shared reality.

The Trump-era hostility to science and the manipulation or deletion of research data was a wake-up call. Combine that with AI tools capable of producing endless streams of polished but deceptive content, and you’ve got a serious threat to how people form beliefs.

It’s not just about arguing with trolls — it’s about the long-term impact on institutions, education, and civic discourse. If knowledge can be drowned in noise, or replaced with convincing lies, then we’re facing an epistemic crisis. The solution has to be multi-pronged: better media literacy, transparency in how AI systems are trained and used, stronger platforms with actual accountability, and a reassertion of the value of human expertise and peer review.

This isn’t fear-mongering. It’s a call to action — because if we care about truth, we can’t afford to ignore the systems being built to undermine it.

NOW you’re getting it.

The US, and now MAGA, have historically been willing to play with a great many loaded guns. And we’ve shot ourselves in the foot a great many times. Dead soldiers? Meh. But fucking with our food supply has always been off the table.

Not to get all lemmy/capitalist/communist/revolution/comrade on ya, but as long as we’re fat and happy, no violence. The government is not stupid, not at that level anyway. Look how the government laid in food during the Cold War, converted us to a food exporter, fucked with Russia’s wheat exports. The powers that be are keenly aware that the population is a very short 3-days away from total breakdown. 2 weeks without food and the guns come out.

How many people voted Trump because egg prices were too high? Serious question. How many ignorant voters thought, “This is some boolshit! This is the President’s fault and I want change!”

Now imagine us fat Americans skipping a single meal. FFS, we rioted over a toilet paper shortage, and made it worse by rioting. Merely inconveniencing an armed population who has always had access to cheap and easy food? The mind boggles. Wait till we see empty consumer goods shelves in the next couple of months. Imagine if that was food.

EDIT: Too tired to get my thoughts in order. You get my drift. Goodnight John Boy.

Hits hard! But the people that need to digest it wouldn’t get the reference.

I think, perhaps, there is room in between those bullet points. Perhaps a few more nuanced options?

The survey did not go into details on the criteria used

I’m out. This “news” is utter trash. Shame on anyone who upvoted this out of “feels”. Some of you are no better than MAGA, popularizing garbage because it fits your view. Fucking be better.