There isn't a lot of money in 40 year old computer books targeted at children

This game was created before virtual currency and pay to win was a thing. The potential money is probably too corrupting.

> Yes, the AI may have produced the recommendation but a human decided to follow it, so that human must be held accountable

It is common and a mistake IMO to rely on the AI as the sole source for answers to follow-up questions. Better verification would have humans sign off on the veracity of fundamental assumptions. But where does this live? Can an AI model be trusted to rely on previous corrections? This seems impossible or possibly adversarial in a public cloud.

We now live in a courtier world where flattery and politics determine successful outcomes.

That has been the case for a vast swathe of time across history. It hurts because we had a nice couple of decades where it seemed that, not only was this not the case, but that we were directionally accelerating away from it.

Yes we do. We always did, and we still do.

I love the accessibility and diversity of large city living in the US, but it is definitely the exception to the rule. The US is hoping for technological breakthroughs in self driving electric cars to bail us out from the sprawl we've created.

The actual smart money isn't selling knowledge to anyone else. They are using it to make money.

I had an idea once for connecting an old 8-bit computer to the modern web by connecting to a text-based web browser running on another device using the terminal. Maybe one day when I find more time.

You can get some of the way there with an Amiga.

I have a Framework laptop. It was expensive for the specs, but I really appreciate the philosophy of openness. I have replaced both the keyboard and battery, which was easy and painless. At least for Dell, I don't think Framework's target market is a fit for acquisition like Alienware's was. Although, Dell is big enough that they could probably build a competing brand themselves. It would be great for consumers if they did.

I am pretty sure that my previous attempts at a Linux desktop have failed because I would tweak my setup by installing packages and updates until I broke it and needed to reinstall. But I want my machine to be indestructible and "just work". Waiting day(s) to diagnose and fix an issue just isn't worth it. I have been contemplating a switch to Linux again. This time, I will embrace a LTS distribution and virtualization so that my tinkering doesn't break things. I always want a safe level to fall back to. Also, I would enthusiastically pay for a support subscription. I know they are out there. Which companies/organizations have the most positive impact in the open source community?

Not a popular opinion, but RedHat (now IBM) funds an enormous amount of critical open source. They pay people to contribute to hundreds of upstream projects. And RHEL is 100% focused on stability. Sounds like a good match for your priorities / goals.

There is no meaningful support subscription for end users, only enterprise. If you want to donate pick specific small projects you like.

I don’t understand how someone breaks a system but look into immutable options like Fedora Silverblue.

It has been a few years, but for example breaking the display, bluetooth, power states/sleep, or wifi. Or subtly messing up dependencies of various other packages that I was trying. I just don't want the overhead of system administration. These days I mostly use VMs or WSL. But I am thinking that I want my host OS to be Linux.

Immutable saves you from packaging issues but configuration always has to happen to some degree. To help there maybe use file system snapshots (btrfs) to rollback changes.

From what I remember, trying to fix configuration was mostly to recover from whatever broken state package/distro updates caused. Thanks for the Silverblue suggestion. In recent years, I enjoyed using Pop!_OS, at least on VMs.

The dial tone was prior to dialing. Upon connection, there was an audible sound from the modem handshake. Through some google searches, I came across this recording: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo