Timeguessr is neat. The advantage there is that, unlike Time Portal, I don't feel pain and depression by the countless anachronisms made up by AI that people will think bear some semblance to reality (I'm a historian).
Yeah, that's a big reason that I wanted to (hypothetically speaking) rip all my blu-rays and DVDs.
Rip them while they're still good, and store them on a RAID hard drive cluster with proper error correction, and I think that as long as I'm a little vigilant with scrubbing and replacing drives when they fail, it should last quite awhile.
It really depends on a lot of factors, including time and place. The lot of a "medieval peasant" was not the same across time (1000+ years) and place (all of Europe) and varied a ton. Your link is a response to an article by an economist that notes periods of high wages in the fourteenth century in England, that's it. There were certainly times when peasants had much less labor to perform on their lord's lands, or might have been free peasants and have none, or lived in an area with no demesne-like system, etc.
Which just makes the whole thing of looking at the life of peasants and talking about how much free time they had compared to us all the sillier. The point about what else you need to do to live (cook, mend clothes, etc.) is important, but makes it even more difficult to compare to our modern lives, even variation aside.
I'm old enough to have grown up with all that, but I was always amazed by all that analog tech, still am. I know people marvel at the black slabs we carry around, but to me that's just a smaller computer and not particularly "magic." Versus something like an SLR camera or a mechanical watch? Those are just mind boggling to me.
I'm fully straddling both. I loved successfully recapping a Macintosh SE and restoring a Lathe from 1964. I was mentally counting the execution threads in the processors in the house, got up into the upper 50's and chuckled going from 54 to 55 when including the 68000 in the Mac.
Sugrue's "The Origins of the Urban Crisis" has a much more nuanced thesis, and part of it is that people were leaving well before the 1967 Uprising, part of it was broader economic changes, part of it was governmental policies (especially with regards to housing and transportation).
The causes of the decline of Detroit's population are complex, not something that can be distilled in an HN comment honestly. But the idea that no one left Detroit willingly is not correct. I know people who did, even interviewed someone who said their family left due to simple racism: a Black family moved to their neighborhood so they left. Of course, in many cases choices could be weighted by other things like, say, you wanted to purchase a house but couldn't get a mortgage in the city due to extensive redlining but could easily get one in the suburbs.
My family left the city in order to raise children. We tend to forget that cities can turn bad fast when there is an economic crash. They are the first places to be hit with drugs and crime.
It would depend on the age of the typewriter, even the US. Many early ones did not have dedicated keys for symbols, which were made as the parent describes: by going back and typing another character over them (e.g., S backspace / to get a dollar sign).
Sure, I used one back in the 01980s where "!" was "'." with a backspace in between to overstrike them. And of course that's also what _, ^, `, etc., are for.
Google has certainly gone downhill, but after trying to use Perplexity a couple months ago after a friend espoused how great it was, I quickly gave up on it. I was mostly using it to figure out specific technical terms related to architecture. Google was feeding me so much SEO'ed crap from random construction companies that just repeated the same stuff.
At first Perplexity seemed great, even providing links to the the sources it was drawing its answers from. But after the fifth or so time of not finding the terms it was claiming as real in any of its cited sources, I gave up. And the sources it was citing weren't even particularly good, just the same ones Google was surfacing.
Since everything could just be a hallucination, I was wasting even more time using it than Google. And even when Perplexity isn't hallucinating, I still can't just how trustworthy its sources are without clicking on them, which is another huge problem with searches like that. The context the information is presented in matters as much as the information itself.
Have you tried Kagi? I’ve set all my devices to use it, and I’m at the point where I get annoyed when something goes to Google by mistake and I see crappy results. Kagi just gives much better results.
Did you try any of your queries using Perplexity Pro? (even at the free tier they give you a few 'Pro' queries a day) While it's still far from perfect, the Pro answers are generally higher quality than the free ones.
I'm finding several of the LLM's that can cite sources, including Perplexity, are more useful to me than Google for search these days. The notable exception is Gemini which has been quite bad in my experience compared to the other options.
Agree about the rarity of trackpoints. One manufacture of those is TEX (Shinobi, Yoda), always wanted to try one out. Still waiting for someone to make a custom keyboard in an Alice (or similar) style with a trackpoint; that way you could have a trackpoint but also use standard MX keycap sets. The TEX ones would involve carving into the G, H, and B keys.
The dots make that site look very pointillist to me, and the colors are pretty impressionistic too. And it's just paths through a hilly landscape with trees as far as I can tell, none of the beaches or architectural and urban settings in Hiroshi Nagai's paintings. Maybe I'm missing something though.
