Trying to write my own C programs that do TCP/IP on OS/2 Warp 4. Didn’t go so well. This operating system is much, much more dead than DOS and it’s super hard to find any information. 🫤

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L’interface web par défaut de mastodon est décidément très lourde. J’adore utiliser à la place pinafore. C’est un bon compromis devant brutaldon. Dommage que l’auto-héberger semble si fragile, mais le site officiel est très bien: https://pinafore.social/

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We participated with the scouts in the county cleanup day and even found a whole rubbish dump at the edge of the woods. Somebody must have dumped a whole truck load down the hill and burried half of it. We filled up a complete trailer with that. I reckon you can get much more out of this place.

Just in time for the start of the event, it began pouring down on us. It was very muddy, but still good fun. One cub scout said: “Oh, this is so cool! Walking around earlier on the paths and picking up trash wasn’t bad, but this here is really awesome. I really do enjoy it a lot. Look how much trash there is. Crazy!”

It took me half an hour to hose down all the clay from my rain jacket, -trousers and boots. What a mess.

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Cognition Emerges From Stealth To Launch AI Software Engineer ‘Devin’
Longtime Slashdot reader ahbond shares a report from VentureBeat: Today, Cognition, a recently formed AI startup backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and tech industry leaders including former Twitter executive Elad Gil and Doordash co-founder Tony Xu, announced a fully autonomous AI software engineer called “Devin.” While there are mult … ⌘ Read more

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Most Subscription Apps Don’t Make Money, Report Shows
According to a new analysis of the subscription app economy from mobile subscription toolkit provider RevenueCat, the top 5% of apps generate 200 times the revenue of the bottom quartile after their first year, while the median monthly revenue an app generates after 12 months is under $50 USD. From a report: The “State of Subscription Apps” report offers a bird’s-eye view in … ⌘ Read more

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California State Legislator Proposes Ending Daylight Saving Time
Legislation proposed in California “aims to repeal Daylight saving time and put California permanently on Standard time,” reports a San Diego news station:

In November 2018, California voters passed Prop 7, a measure that would allow the state legislature to change Daylight saving time by either keeping it year-round or getting rid of it altogeth … ⌘ Read more

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Public Trust In AI Is Sinking Across the Board
Trust in AI technology and the companies that develop it is dropping, in both the U.S. and around the world, according to new data from Edelman shared first with Axios. Axios reports: Globally, trust in AI companies has dropped to 53%, down from 61% five years ago. In the U.S., trust has dropped 15 percentage points (from 50% to 35%) over the same period. Trust in AI is low across … ⌘ Read more

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Google Steps Up Microsoft Criticism, Warns of Rival’s Monopoly in Cloud
Alphabet’s Google Cloud on Monday ramped up its criticism of Microsoft’s cloud computing practices, saying its rival is seeking a monopoly that would harm the development of emerging technologies such as generative AI. From a report: “We worry about Microsoft wanting to flex their decade-long practices where they had a lot of monopoly … ⌘ Read more

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Tinder Owner Inks Deal With OpenAI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In a press release written with help from ChatGPT, Match Group announced an enterprise agreement with the AI chatbot’s maker, OpenAI. The new agreement includes over 1,000 enterprise licenses for the dating app giant and home to Tinder, Match, OkCupid, Hinge and others. The AI tech will be used to help Match Group employees with work-related tasks, the compa … ⌘ Read more

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No ‘GPT’ Trademark For OpenAI
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has denied OpenAI’s attempt to trademark “GPT,” ruling that the term is “merely descriptive” and therefore unable to be registered. From a report: […] The name, according to the USPTO, doesn’t meet the standards to register for a trademark and the protections a “TM” after the name affords. (Incidentally, they refused once back in October, and this is a “FINAL” in all caps denial … ⌘ Read more

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Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show
“A lot of that AI chatbots that you spend days talking to push hard on getting more and more private information from you,” writes longtime Slashdot reader michelcultivo, sharing a report from Gizmodo.

“To be perfectly blunt, AI girlfriends and boyfriends are not your friends,” says Misha Rykov, a Mozilla Researcher from the company’s *Privacy Not Included project. “Alth … ⌘ Read more

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‘Damn Small Linux’ is Back - But Bigger
Back in 2006 Slashdot reported on a 50-megabyte “micro” distro called Damn Small Linux. (And in 2012 we wrote that it “rose from the dead” with a new release candidate.)

Now Damn Small Linux has been reborn again, according to its developer’s web site:

Creating the original DSL, a versatile 50MB distribution, was a lot of fun and one of the things I am most proud of as a personal accomplishment … ⌘ Read more

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Deep Abandoned Mine In Finland To Be Turned Into a Giant Gravity Battery
James Felton reports via IFL Science: One of the deepest metal mines in Europe – the Pyhasalmi Mine in central Finland – is to be turned into an enormous gravity battery capable of storing 2 megawatts of energy. […] Despite the cool name, the idea behind gravity batteries is really simple. During times when energy sources a … ⌘ Read more

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After getting used to it, I’m loving this date format:
2024-02-06

I liked ‘6feb2024’, although isn’t as international as the former.
And… ‘06/02/24’ is awful, don’t use it!

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Scammer Poses As CFO in Deepfaked Meeting On Zoom, Steals $25 Million
Slashdot reader Press2ToContinue shared this report from WION:

: The Hong Kong branch of a multinational company has lost $25.6 million after a scammer used deepfake technology to pose as the firm’s chief financial officer (CFO) in a video conference call and ordered money transfers, according to the police, in what is being highlighted a … ⌘ Read more

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The Fossil Fuel Industry Knew About Climate Change Since 1954
The Guardian reports:

The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels. A coalition of oil and car … ⌘ Read more

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