• billwashere@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I remember a podcast I used to listen to a long time ago that argued that MS should just make a fork of the Linux kernel and just make the gui work like Windows. Better security and stability, and huge increase in user base with all the normal Linux users seeing it as viable alternative. I thought it was a brilliant idea. Well except Microsoft would likely have figured a way to kill Linux from the inside.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      Except for the part where decades’ worth of software no longer runs on Windows.

      • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Seriously, Microsoft’s absurd level of commitment to backwards compatibility is the entire reason Windows has such staying power. I had to fuck around with things to get a Linux port of a ten year old game running without issues, and it was even the Steam version, but Windows will install and run most twenty year old games right off of the original CD without the user having to do anything at all.

        • tiddy@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          I hear this a lot but in production I still see xp/win 7 era PC’s all the time due to comparability issues (half the time still online too :/ )

          Maybe its just absurd support for big spenders like the US military?

          Seems like the small companies are mostly getting burned by gambling on MS

        • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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          1 month ago

          That compatability has been dropping recently, especially for games. Most of my CD games need extra libraries to run now, if they work at all.

    • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 month ago

      That is the literal opposite of what the world needs.

      Windows isn’t a bad OS from a purely technical perspective. If Windows were released as FOSS, I would switch to Windows without hesitation.

      • Steven McTowelie@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        The full Microsoft XP source code was leaked and is available for anyone on GitHub; not the same, I know, but it’s atleast NT based. I’ve just always wondered why a community never formed to fork it

        • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Because it’s not legal and no one’s going to develop software for XP. Someone could make and sell security patches for it, but the type of person who still runs XP either doesn’t care enough to buy security patches or it’s running some hardware that isn’t connected to the internet.

          There are exactly two games released in the past few years that have XP support, but that was more a flex on the part of the developer then catering to the market. HROT and Zortch are those games if you’re curious.

      • GaMEChld@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Are you sure it’s not bad from a technical perspective? I saw a story from a former programmer talking about how changes would be made the to the interface in the new settings app that’s trying to replace control panel and the shit was like a horror story.

        • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 month ago

          maybe, but there are also things it arguably does better than Linux, e.g. user access control

          (If you can still find this story, I’d be very interested in it, please do link to it here.)

        • Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 month ago

          Mostly because Microsoft tries to maintain backwards compatibility to ridiculous extents, and their customers grew accustomed to it so they kinda rely on it, no ?

          • Steven McTowelie@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            Surely it’s less work to maintain security patches for a few prior versions of windows than it is to indefinitely maintain backwards compatibility

            • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              Sure, and for home users the backwards compatibility feature only really comes up for people into retro-gaming, but a significant portion of their customer base is government agencies that haven’t updated their software since the '90s. The old hardware is dying, so they need new stuff, and that means something with a new OS to run it, but it also needs to be able to run an ancient program that can only be replaced if some some seventy-something who calls every console a Nintendo can be made to understand why software older than their grandkids isn’t the best thing to have, and they might need to introduce and pass a bill to get it done, not to mention budgeting to commission a company to code the replacement.

          • GaMEChld@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            I mean, they do until they don’t. They eventually retired 16 bit subsystem, and they are gungho on TPM now. They have always had EOL dates for old OS’s too. I’m not entirely sure why they do what they do, I suspect they are too large and unwieldy to operate as an entity with a unified vision.

          • MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip
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            1 month ago

            The windows kernel isn’t all that great, particularly in the realm of memory security or scheduling.

            You know, to each their own. Question is really whether windows maintaining a closed source kernel even makes sense from a maintenance burden perspective when it really doesn’t give them much money in return. (Most of their money in 2025 comes from cloud services, not operating systems)

            • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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              1 month ago

              Rumors (Yes, just rumors, I know) have it that MS is working on a shim to be able to just use the Linux kernel under the hood. That’s what spawned WSL. It is a side effect of the work to get the shim between the Win64 userland and Linux kernel. The shim will probably be a temporary thing, until all the ABIs are done.

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
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    1 month ago

    They share some inspiration. Same with Linux/Unix confusion.

    About 15 minutes in a terminal trying to do Linux’y things are you get completely disillusioned.

  • irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 month ago

    I mean it’s kind of like the “humans evolved from monkeys” or whatever primate you want to substitute for monkey. No, they branched off from a common ancestor though.

    I mean lots of people get mixed up between BSD, Linux, UNIX, and all the variations over the years. Is MacOS a version of Linux? No. Is a human a type of ape? No. Are MacOS and Linux way, way closer than either are to Windows, hell yes. Just like people are way closer to being monkeys than swallows. There’s a lot of mixed breeding in both examples and a lot of total incompatibilities as well.

  • ThiefUserPermissions@lemmy.myserv.one
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    1 month ago

    The video claims ada lovelace did not write the first computer program but it would kind of depend how you define what that is. If you check wikipedia it states:

    “During 1842–1849, Ada Lovelace translated the memoir of Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea about Charles Babbage’s newest proposed machine: the Analytical Engine; she supplemented the memoir with notes that specified in detail a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the engine, recognized by most of historians as the world’s first published computer program.”

    From : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages

    This would indicate its not a cut and dry as the youtuber suggests and also I would assume he is not a historian(no clue who he is) so its unclear why his opinion or definition of computer program should usurp that of most historians who would recognise a term may change over time and be less well defined initially when inspiring a new technology?

    • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      This would indicate its not a cut and dry as the youtuber suggests and also I would assume he is not a historian(no clue who he is) so its unclear why his opinion or definition of computer program should usurp that of most historians who would recognise a term may change over time and be less well defined initially when inspiring a new technology?

      He’s a long-standing member of the tech pundit community (dare I say the Linux community), and in recent years has been exposed as antivax, anti-woke, and a bigot. Before that he was just a confident sounding asshole with sometimes interesting opinions.

      • ThiefUserPermissions@lemmy.myserv.one
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        1 month ago

        Fair. I didnt check any of the other myths so some may well be myths. Just interesting to me that his opinion is stated as fact when its a bit of a grey area and one could easily interpret her to be the first programmer in some ways. Its not like a computer has to exist to write a computer program, for example, you can imagine a world where all computers are destroyed in an event but a surviving programmer can still write a computer program if you just handed them a stone tablet and charcoal. The non existence of a computer is problem, and a computer program written in a textbook is also valid.

        The mac osx is linux certainly is a less controversial myth.

        • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 month ago

          Nah, I think it’s neat as well. Lemmy would be more boring if no user had idiosyncrasies.

          Hell, I’ve even tagged you with “CC BY-NC-SA 4.0” in my Lemmy client - which means I will confront you if you ever stop doing it.

          • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            Nah, I think it’s neat as well. Lemmy would be more boring if no user had idiosyncrasies.

            Kind of a sad state of affairs for us all, that wanting to license your own content would be considered an idiosyncrasy, but I get what you were trying to say. 🙂

            Hell, I’ve even tagged you with “CC BY-NC-SA 4.0” in my Lemmy client -

            Well I’m not the first to use it, I learned to use it here from someone else, but open source licensing notoriety is something I can live with. 😜

            which means I will confront you if you ever stop doing it.

            Honestly it would be me just leaving Lemmy (again) if the harassment gets to be too much (Edit: Example: https://lemmy.world/comment/15320340).

            But I’d rather be here than Reddit, even with the lesser moderation that happens here.

            I do appreciate your support, thank you. 👍

            This comment is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

          • grue@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            Nope, the opposite: in the absence of an explicit license, the default is “all rights reserved.”

            • toynbee@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              I kind of suspected it might be something like that, but it was a genuine query that, yes, was intended to be mildly humorous. I don’t intentionally annoy except maybe my wife.

              Your indirect accusation made me smirk, but as far as I’ve noticed you’re the only one who does this without doing it on every comment, which seemed interesting enough to observe.

                • toynbee@lemmy.world
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                  1 month ago

                  Ah. Well, I have questions or comments I could make about the license. However, while I feel passionately about Unix and Linux and OSS in general, I don’t think I have anything useful or interesting to add to the thread that hasn’t already been said.

                  I wish you luck both with finding engaging conversation and with your licensing.

      • juli@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        The return of the forum signatures, whether you like it or not.

        Mines going to be an ad from NordVPN and maybe Apex Legends? I wonder what’s their rate like? 🤷‍♂️

      • infeeeee@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        You are not new to lemmy, it says you registered a year ago, but is this the first time you meet a comment with license info? You are one of today’s lucky 10000.

        I’ve seen this on multiple users, usually it’s some anti ai license. Like the laws stopped facebook from torrenting copyrighted books, an anti ai license will stop the next ai startup scraping the fediverse.

        • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          I’m only aware of myself, and the one other person who I learned to do this from, on Lemmy. That was tenish months ago, but still.

          I haven’t seen anyone else, even the other person I mentioned previously, since having returned to Lemmy recently.

          Be nice if you were right, but I haven’t seen it really.

          This comment is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    • Pieisawesome@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 month ago

      That license does nothing.

      Your comments aren’t licensed because you put something in them. It’s stopping nothing. Licensing is an agreement, and requires parties to consent. You don’t just magically force licenses onto people.

      If this was real I could license my comments where if you read them, you owe me 10k.

      This is the digital equivalent of sovereign citizens.

      • Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        So, if I go to a library, pick a book and start reading it, I am then free to completely copy it because I didn’t agree to any licensing?

          • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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            1 month ago

            No, it doesn’t matter if the book is at a library or on my friend’s bookshelf, copyright law is literally the right to copy the thing. So if I make an illegal copy, I’m breaking copyright law. The “ToS” I’ve “agreed” to is the law of the country I’m in.

      • mholiv@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        I don’t think it’s equivalent to sovereign citizens. OP is the author of their comment and therefore has the copyrights. As the author one can license their work as all rights reserved or other permissive licenses.

        OP chooses to license their work as Creative Commons.

        They’re not forcing you to accept the license, it’s your local government that enforces copyright.

        The reason why this might work on Lemmy but not on corporate Social media is that corporate social media often have terms of service that require you to give them ownership/rights/etc. Lemmy has no such ToC.

        • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          The reason why this might work on Lemmy but not on corporate Social media is that corporate social media often have terms of service that require you to give them ownership/rights/etc. Lemmy has no such ToC.

          Actually, Safe Harbor laws would encompass social media sites as well, so it would work there as well.

          Either corporations own the content you post and are responsible for it, or they just host your content you post that you own and are immune from harm for the content. The law is currently the latter, and not the former.

          Also, law trumps ToS’s.

          This comment is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

          • mholiv@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            I don’t think the ToS approach would be invalidated here via your Safe Harbor fork theory.

            The ToS could state something like “you give us a worldwide perpetual right to use your content in any way we want including granting this right to whom we designate”

            You still own your content but by having an account you agree to the ToS that lets them do what they want.

            They just host it and are safe.

            • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              TOS can’t change Law, can’t strip away rights that you have.

              Law always trumps TOS.

              In fact, if a company tries to via their TOS they are opening themselves up for big risks/lawsuits, as they are trying to gain ownership of your content, voiding their Safe Harbor law protections.

              They can’t have it both ways, thats not how the Law works. Either they have the protection, or they own the content.

              This comment is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

        • catloaf@lemm.ee
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          1 month ago

          This would vary by instance. I don’t see that lemmy.world specifies the terms for user content, which really should be fixed.

          • mholiv@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            It’s a hard problem in the fediverse. It makes for a ticking time bomb of an issue. Imagine I am on a “everything is your own, we don’t sell your stuff” instance while another instance just copy pasted metas ToS. By posting a response to my instance, which then in turn is federated to the meta style instance I create something hard to solve. I can foresee other issues too.

            I see your point. I just think it’s a difficult problem.

      • Affine Connection@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        That license does nothing.

        Especially since the comment itself in question is so short that it would be public domain in practically every jurisdiction.

            • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              Why all the tilde symbols? That’s what makes it quite distracting and hard to read for me tbh.

              I’m using the Lemmy.World formatting (https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html). I’m subscripting the text/link to make it smaller/footer.

              It sounds like your client is not supporting that. You should speak with the devs of your client about that. Here’s the actual formatting string being used by me…

              [~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode.en)

              This comment is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

              • weker01@sh.itjust.works
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                1 month ago

                I am using eternity. There, it’s just a link but every word is surrounded by ~.

                Unfortunately, I don’t think lemmy.world is authoritative in regards to formatting and Lemmy itself – iirc – does not suggest formatting guidelines.

                Spoiler formatting is also a pain because of that :/

                • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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                  1 month ago

                  It looks like the Eternity client doesn’t support subscript?

                  Don’t know what to say, my account is on Lemmy.World, and that’s their instructions on how to format one’s comments. /shrug

                  In the past (tenish months ago) I heard this same issue, and I tried removing the subscripting, which made the footer text the same size of the rest of the text, and then I was getting people complaining about my footer text being too large for a footer. My hope was that ten months later, all clients would support subscript fonts/text.

                  Honestly, at this point I’d suggest you talk to the devs of your client, to support subscript font/text.

                  This comment is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

          • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            Do you spend a lot of time arguing with people over it?

            Allot more than I wish, I really try not to. Even today, I keep asking people to not rehash it, and lets just talk about the topic my comment was posted in. But for some strange reason people just won’t let it go, and push to talk about it.

            This comment is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

            • MouldyCat@feddit.uk
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              1 month ago

              Well like it or not, your footer is just a part of your comments, and so people are invited to respond however they wish when you post it on lemmy. If you don’t like people making the same replies, you can simply stop posting the same content in every comment.

              • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                Well like it or not, your footer is just a part of your comments, and so people are invited to respond however they wish when you post it on lemmy.

                That logic doesn’t track though, as that content is just a footer, it is not the actual content of what’s being discussed in the post, which is what people should be responding to.

                It would be the same as if for every comment I made on a subject it opposed people instead started asking me questions about my username, and not discussing the subject of the post.

                If you don’t like people making the same replies, you can simply stop posting the same content in every comment.

                You really shouldn’t be “blaming the victim” on this one.

                Even if what you said previously is true, when a person has been directed to a location where an answer to their question has already been given, and they refuse to do so, but instead continue to badger the person directly, that’s detrimental to the conversation being had (by derailing it), as well as I would argue to Lemmy itself. And if done enough times on purpose could be considered harassment.

                People should not be able to dictate what other people put in their comments, and should definitely not harass them continuously over what they have in their comments.

                This comment is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

        • RogueBanana@lemmy.zip
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          1 month ago

          I am getting annoyed on your behalf lol. Why do people feel the need to screech at others doing something harmless when they could just shut up and ignore it is beyond me. Not a fair comparison but it does feel like republicans shouting at trans people.

          • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            Thanks, appreciate the support!

            It’s amazing how bent out of shape some people get about this, both currently, as well as about tenish months ago when I last was on Lemmy (check out my comment history from that time period if you really want to get annoyed).

            I got to imagine that its people who want to farm the comments for their LLMs training, that are trying to prevent the popular usage of people licensing their content.

            This comment is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

            • RogueBanana@lemmy.zip
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              1 month ago

              Honestly I don’t believe it would help myself but who am I to tell you what to do. As someone else mentioned, it’s probably people who simply have to correct others when they don’t share the option. Doubt it would be anything like being in support of LLMs, probably the opposite.

              • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                Honestly I don’t believe it would help myself

                It would help if the companies that are training their LLMs honor content creators licenses. If they ignore the law in that, then it would in theory need to be policed.

                In either case, its a quick copy/paste on my part, so /shrug.

                As someone else mentioned, it’s probably people who simply have to correct others when they don’t share the option. Doubt it would be anything like being in support of LLMs, probably the opposite.

                I don’t know. It would behoove those who need our content to train their LLMs to intimidate/redirect people away from licensing their content. And I can’t imagine regular people getting so caught up to spend so much time on this issue. If you look through my comment history, starting 9-10 months ago, and see how many replies I’ve gotten, and even how posts talk about this issue (https://lemmy.world/post/14942506), I can’t imagine a single link would cause all of that. Theres got to be something more to it than that.

                This comment is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

                • RogueBanana@lemmy.zip
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                  1 month ago

                  I was around when that was an active topic back then so I am aware. It’s just I don’t trust any or most companies to respect it anyway. Also as someone else suggested, look into automation lol, I thought you had something like an email signature that gets added automatically.

                • a14o@feddit.org
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                  1 month ago

                  In either case, its a quick copy/paste on my part, so /shrug.

                  I was thinking “okay this somewhat unconventional but whatever” until I read this. Use greasemonkey or something for the love of Christ!

  • Bogasse@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    I’m not that surprised, a lot of people around me dot have a clear picture of what is the relationship between MacOS, Linux and Unix is. So I suppose some of them would guess that Linux is a modern fork of Unix and MacOS based on Unix.

  • Zink@programming.dev
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    1 month ago

    I get that it specifies tech workers, but still my first reaction was that 12% is pretty low. You can find a much higher percentage of people who are confidently wrong about way more important things.

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
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    1 month ago

    What I find more shocking about this assertion is that I have no facts to back it up, but I believe it, and I’m not surprised.

    Of course someone here has a link to some actual research … right?

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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    1 month ago

    It’d help if Lunduke were to explain the true origin of those things like Ada Lovelace and programming, and Grace Hopper and the moth. And what predated that.