Source: Ars Technica
Source: The Verge - All Posts
A few years after buying Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk announced that his AI business xAI has acquired the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. In a tweet, he described it as an all-stock transaction, valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, including $12 billion in debt it had as part of his takeover. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach,” writes Musk.
In response to a deal cementing about $11 billion in lost value since the 2022 sale, X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted, “The future could not be brighter.”
Despite failing so far to make X an “everything app,” Musk has tied these two ventures together closely since launching xAI in the summer of 2023, saying that access to the vast trove of data from Twitter / X would give it a major advantage, and prominently placing xAI’s Grok tool within the social app. This week, Grok launched an integration beyond X, joining Telegram.
The arrangement is also a reminder of a previous Musk deal combining two companies he controlled. Tesla Motors acquired SolarCity, a company with Musk as its largest individual shareholder and his cousin Lyndon Rive as CEO, for $2.6 billion in 2016 and dropped “Motors” from its name. Musk didn’t mention Tesla in the announcement, after already proclaiming “I have, like, 17 jobs” at a hastily-announced all-hands meeting for the car company last week — it’s unclear if this deal adds to or subtracts from the number.
Today’s tweet also didn’t mention his ambition for the service to handle “someone’s entire financial life,” but it does repeat his claim of X as “the digital town square.”As we noted in January, xAI staffers were also X employees, with company laptops and access to its code base. Musk had also previously claimed X investors would own 25 percent of XAI, but as of January, that had not materialized for X employees with shares in the company.
While X’s valuation had reportedly dropped since the 2022 takeover before recently rebounding, the value of xAI has risen along with other companies in the space like Nvidia and OpenAI, where Musk has gone from co-founder and early investor to rival and legal antagonist since walking away in 2018. The Wall Street Journal reported xAI had been valued at $50 billion in an investment round last November, more than double its $24 billion valuation during another funding round in the spring of 2024.
@xAI has acquired @X in an all-stock transaction. The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt).
Since its founding two years ago, xAI has rapidly become one of the leading AI labs in the world, building models and data centers at unprecedented speed and scale.
X is the digital town square where more than 600M active users go to find the real-time source of ground truth and, in the last two years, has been transformed into one of the most efficient companies in the world, positioning it to deliver scalable future growth.
xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach. The combined company will deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge. This will allow us to build a platform that doesn’t just reflect the world but actively accelerates human progress.
I would like to recognize the hardcore dedication of everyone at xAI and X that has brought us to this point. This is just the beginning.
Thank you for your continued partnership and support.
Source: Hacker News
Source: OSNews
KDE’s login manager, SDDM, has its share of problems, and as such, a number of KDE developers are working on replacement to fix many of these long-standing issues. So, what exactly is wrong with SDDM as it exists today?
With SDDM, power management is reinvented from scratch with bespoke configuration. We can’t integrate with Plasma’s network management, power management, volume controls, or brightness controls without reinventing them in the desktop-agnostic backend.
SDDM was already having to duplicate too much functionality we have in KDE, which was very frustrating when we’re left maintaining it.
↫ David Edmundson
On top of that, theming is also a big issue with SDDM, as it doesn’t adopt any of the existing Plasma themes, wallpapers, and so on, forcing users to manually makes thse changes for SDDM, and forcing theme developers to make custom themes just for SDDM instead of it just adopting Plasma’s settings. The new login manager they’re working on will instead make use of existing Plasma components and be brought up like Plasma itself, too.
For now, the SDDM replacement is roughly at feature parity with SDDM, but it’s by no means ready for widespread adoption by distributions or users. Developers interested in trying it out can do so, though, and as it mostly looks like the existing default SDDM setup, you won’t even notice anything in day-to-day use.
Source: ToolGuyd
Bambu Labs is launching a new multi-functional “personal manufacturing” machine that goes beyond 3D printing.
The new Bambu H2D is a dual nozzle 3D printer and laser cutter all in one. From some of their marketing images, you could also attach a marker for computer-controlled graphics. It looks like this is only included with the laser combo models.
Described as “a hard core laser machine,” the Bambu H2D can be equipped with a 10W or 40W laser, with the latter being capable of cutting up to 15mm (~0.59″) thick plywood.
The H2D features “laser-proof windows” and they’re also selling an optional air purifier separately.
Bambu says that the new machine features “revolutionary accuracy” with “a motion system that is 10 times more accurate.” This is said to “reduce the hassle of tweaking design and settings” for components that are to be assembled or printed together.
It also features “enhanced motion accuracy” and “special calibration for select Bambu Labs filaments” that are said to provide for “perfect fits with standard parts like steel shaft every time” with “no more tedious gap adjustments needed.”
In their marketing video, Bambu showed off different typical family members using the H2D to print, cut, or fabricate parts for personal projects, include a bicycle seat.
This was also an example of how the dual extruder printer can work with two materials simultaneously for functional parts or for part support scaffolding.
They then show off a 3D-printed bike helmet and quip that the dad shouldn’t go too fast because they haven’t figured out how to 3D print BandAids yet.
The new AMS (automatic material system) looks to have in filament dryer add-on.
Filament drying, dual nozzles, laser cutting, and more? Bambu says the new machine is “bigger, faster, better,” and that seems like an accurate claim.
I own one of their other machines, and it’s as near a plug-and-play machine as I’ve ever seen. The new model looks to expand upon it, with more filament feeding sensors – 15 instead of just 1 – and even more sophisticated AI checklists and visual monitoring via the built-in camera.
From the spec sheet, it has a live view camera, nozzle camera, birdseye camera, toolhead camera, door sensor, filament runout sensor, tangle sensor, filament odometry that’s supported with the AMS, and power loss recovery.
There’s a lot going on here.
Bambu hypes it up, saying the H2D delivers “industrial-grade accuracy.”
Bambu H2D Pricing
Bambu H2D – $1,899
Bambu H2D with AMS Combo – $2,199
Bambu H2D Laser Full Combo with AMS and 10W Laser – $2,799
Bambu H2D Laser Full Combo with AMS and 40W Laser – $3,499
The AMS allows you to load several spools of filament at once, which can then be selected for use via software controls.
It looks to me that Bambu made evolutionary improvements well above and beyond their previous flagship X1C 3D printer.
I’m not sure how I feel about 3D-printed bicycle saddles, but 3D-printed helmets? If they’re recommending you print your own bike helmets, how much attention was given to laser cutter safety outside of the “safety windows” that are found on the H2D Laser Edition models?
I couldn’t find much information about fume extraction or filtration for the laser cutter.
Bambu advertises that the laser modules can work on “wood, rubber, metal sheet, leather, dark acrylic, stone, and more.” A lot of materials – especially plastics – can release very toxic fumes when laser-cut.
They’re hyping this up to be a revolutionary “personal manufacturing hub,” but I have serious concerns about the laser safety.
Bambu machines are not known to be easily repairable. They had a recall not too long ago, and the affected heatbed cable wasn’t user replaceable. The only recourse was to return the entire machine or arrange for replacement of the heatbed and cable by a trained electronics repair technician.
Granted you can’t replace parts of your ink printer yourself, but personal and hobbyist 3D printers have traditionally had accessible hardware.
To their credit, I just checked Bambu’s Wiki and there’s clear and detailed documentation on how to replace certain parts. It seems they have made some progress in a short time.
When I purchased my 3D printer a year ago, I read numerous stories about Bambu’s support not being able to keep up with how many customers they had been gaining, leading to lower quality service. I haven’t had to test Bambu’s support yet, and they might have hired and trained more techs since then.
Bambu seems to be promoting the H2D as a 3D printer and laser cutter for everyone in the family, and I’m not convinced they’re ready for that yet.
Aside from how they show the new machine operating in the middle of a child’s bedroom with no mention of filtration or exhaust, I can’t get over the part about 3D printed helmets. That can’t be very protective, right? Stick with store-bought helmets that are certified to meet safety standards.
There’s a lot of hype, but also a lot of substance.
My biggest hesitations are centered around the safety of this machine, and of Bambu’s support quality. Pushing beyond 3D printing and fabrication hobbyists and into the average consumer territory is a big step. I’ll keep my wallet in my pocket for now.
There’s also the matter of how pricing starts close to $2000 and then balloons to $3500 if you want the full combo with their higher powered laser option.
I’ve been avoiding cheap laser cutters – even when offered to me for review consideration – because I have yet to find one I can trust to be safe. I’m not sure I’d trust Bambu just yet. We’ll see.
Source: Hack a Day
Let’s say you’ve got a big bare wall in your home, and you want some art on it. You could hang a poster or a framed artwork, or you could learn to paint a mural yourself. Or, like [Nik Ivanov], you could build a plotter called Mural, and get it to draw something on the wall for you.
The build is straightforward enough. It uses a moving carriage suspended from toothed belts attached to two points up high on the wall. Stepper motors built into the carriage reel the belts in and out to move it up and down the wall, and from side to side. In this case, [Nik] selected a pair of NEMA 17 steppers to do the job. They’re commanded by a NodeMCU ESP32, paired with TMC2209 stepper motor drivers. The carriage also includes a pen lifter, which relies on a MG90s servo to lift the drawing implement away from the wall.
The build is quite capable, able to recreate SVG vector graphics quite accurately, without obvious skew or distortion. [Nik] has been using the plotter with washable Crayola markers, so he can print on the wall time and again without leaving permanent marks. It’s a great way to decorate—over and over again—on a budget. Total estimated cost is under $100, according to [Nik].
We’ve featured some neat projects along these lines before, too. Video after the break.
Source: Ken Shirriff's blog
In the early 1960s, Douglas Engelbart started investigating how computers could augment human intelligence: "If, in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that?" Engelbart developed many features of modern computing that we now take for granted: the mouse,1 hypertext, shared documents, windows, and a graphical user interface. At the 1968 Joint Computer Conference, Engelbart demonstrated these innovations in a groundbreaking presentation, now known as "The Mother of All Demos."
Engelbart's demo also featured an input device known as the keyset, but unlike his other innovations, the keyset failed to catch on. The 5-finger keyset lets you type without moving your hand, entering characters by pressing multiple keys simultaneously as a chord. Christina Englebart, his daughter, loaned one of Engelbart's keysets to me. I constructed an interface to connect the keyset to USB, so that it can be used with a modern computer. The video below shows me typing with the keyset, using the mouse buttons to select upper case and special characters.2
I wrote this blog post to describe my USB keyset interface. Along the way, however, I got sidetracked by the history of The Mother of All Demos and how it obtained that name. It turns out that Engelbart's demo isn't the first demo to be called "The Mother of All Demos".
Engelbart's work has its roots in Vannevar Bush's 1945 visionary essay, "As We May Think." Bush envisioned thinking machines, along with the "memex", a compact machine holding a library of collective knowledge with hypertext-style links: "The Encyclopedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox." The memex could search out information based on associative search, building up a hypertext-like trail of connections.
In the early 1960s, Engelbart was inspired by Bush's essay and set out to develop means to augment human intellect: "increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems."3 Engelbart founded the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI), where he and his team created a system called NLS (oN-Line System).
In 1968, Engelbart demonstrated NLS to a crowd of two thousand people at the Fall Joint Computer Conference. Engelbart gave the demo from the stage, wearing a crisp shirt and tie and a headset microphone. Engelbart created hierarchical documents, such as the shopping list above, and moved around them with hyperlinks. He demonstrated how text could be created, moved, and edited with the keyset and mouse. Other documents included graphics, crude line drawing by today's standards but cutting-edge for the time. The computer's output was projected onto a giant screen, along with video of Engelbart.
Engelbart sat at a specially-designed Herman Miller desk6 that held the keyset, keyboard, and mouse, shown above. While Engelbart was on stage in San Francisco, the SDS 9404 computer that ran the NLS software was 30 miles to the south in Menlo Park.5
To the modern eye, the demo resembles a PowerPoint presentation over Zoom, as Engelbart collaborated with Jeff Rulifson and Bill Paxton, miles away in Menlo Park. (Just like a modern Zoom call, the remote connection started with "We're not hearing you. How about now?") Jeff Rulifson browsed the NLS code, jumping between code files with hyperlinks and expanding subroutines by clicking on them. NLS was written in custom high-level languages, which they developed with a "compiler compiler" called TREE-META. The NLS system held interactive documentation as well as tracking bugs and changes. Bill Paxton interactively drew a diagram and then demonstrated how NLS could be used as a database, retrieving information by searching on keywords. (Although Engelbart was stressed by the live demo, Paxton told me that he was "too young and inexperienced to be concerned.")
Bill English, an electrical engineer, not only built the first mouse for Engelbart but was also the hardware mastermind behind the demo. In San Francisco, the screen images were projected on a 20-foot screen by a Volkswagen-sized Eidophor projector, bouncing light off a modulated oil film. Numerous cameras, video switchers and mixers created the video image. Two leased microwave links and half a dozen antennas connected SRI in Menlo Park to the demo in San Francisco. High-speed modems send the mouse, keyset, and keyboard signals from the demo back to SRI. Bill English spent months assembling the hardware and network for the demo and then managed the demo behind the scenes, assisted by a team of about 17 people.
Another participant was the famed counterculturist Stewart Brand, known for the Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL, one of the oldest online virtual communities. Brand advised Engelbart on the presentation, as well as running a camera. He'd often point the camera at a monitor to generate swirling psychedelic feedback patterns, reminiscent of the LSD that he and Engelbart had experimented with.
The demo received press attention such as a San Francisco Chronicle article titled "Fantastic World of Tomorrow's Computer". It stated, "The most fantastic glimpse into the computer future was taking place in a windowless room on the third floor of the Civic Auditorium" where Engelbart "made a computer in Menlo Park do secretarial work for him that ten efficient secretaries couldn't do in twice the time." His goal: "We hope to help man do better what he does—perhaps by as much as 50 per cent." However, the demo received little attention in the following decades.7
Engelbart continued his work at SRI for almost a decade, but as Engelbart commented with frustration, “There was a slightly less than universal perception of our value at SRI”.8 In 1977, SRI sold the Augmentation Research Center to Tymshare, a time-sharing computing company. (Timesharing was the cloud computing of the 1970s and 1980s, where companies would use time on a centralized computer.) At Tymshare, Engelbart's system was renamed AUGMENT and marketed as an office automation service, but Engelbart himself was sidelined from development, a situation that he described as sitting in a corner and becoming invisible.
Meanwhile, Bill English and some other SRI researchers9 migrated four miles south to Xerox PARC and worked on the Xerox Alto computer. The Xerox Alto incorporated many ideas from the Augmentation Research Center including the graphical user interface, the mouse, and the keyset. The Alto's keyset was almost identical to the Engelbart keyset, as can be seen in the photo below. The Alto's keyset was most popular for the networked 3D shooter game "Maze War", with the clicking of keysets echoing through the hallways of Xerox PARC.
Xerox famously failed to commercialize the ideas from the Xerox Alto, but Steve Jobs recognized the importance of interactivity, the graphical user interface, and the mouse when he visited Xerox PARC in 1979. Steve Jobs provided the Apple Lisa and Macintosh ended up with a graphical user interface and the mouse (streamlined to one button instead of three), but he left the keyset behind.10
When McDonnell Douglas acquired Tymshare in 1984, Engelbart and his software—now called Augment—had a new home.11 In 1987, McDonnell Douglas released a text editor and outline processor for the IBM PC called MiniBASE, one of the few PC applications that supported a keyset. The functionality of MiniBASE was almost identical to Engelbart's 1968 demo, but in 1987, MiniBASE was competing against GUI-based word processors such as MacWrite and Microsoft Word, so MiniBASE had little impact. Engelbart left McDonnell Douglas in 1988, forming a research foundation called the Bootstrap Institute to continue his research independently.
The name "The Mother of All Demos" has its roots in the Gulf War. In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, leading to war between Iraq and a coalition of the United States and 41 other countries. During the months of buildup prior to active conflict, Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, exhorted the Iraqi people to prepare for "the mother of all battles",12 a phrase that caught the attention of the media. The battle didn't proceed as Hussein hoped: during exactly 100 hours of ground combat, the US-led coalition liberated Kuwait, pushed into Iraq, crushed the Iraqi forces, and declared a ceasefire.13 Hussein's mother of all battles became the mother of all surrenders.
The phrase "mother of all ..." became the 1990s equivalent of a meme, used as a slightly-ironic superlative. It was applied to everything from The Mother of All Traffic Jams to The Mother of All Windows Books, from The Mother of All Butter Cookies to Apple calling mobile devices The Mother of All Markets.14
In 1991, this superlative was applied to a computer demo, but it wasn't Engelbart's demo. Andy Grove, Intel's president, gave a keynote speech at Comdex 1991 entitled The Second Decade: Computer-Supported Collaboration, a live demonstration of his vision for PC-based video conferencing and wireless communication in the PC's second decade. This complex hour-long demo required almost six months to prepare, with 15 companies collaborating. Intel called this demo "The Mother of All Demos", a name repeated in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Fortune, and PC Week.15 Andy Grove's demo was a hit, with over 20,000 people requesting a video tape, but the demo was soon forgotten.
In 1994, Wired writer Steven Levy wrote Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything.8 In the second chapter of this comprehensive book, Levy explained how Vannevar Bush and Doug Engelbart "sparked a chain reaction" that led to the Macintosh. The chapter described Engelbart's 1968 demo in detail including a throwaway line saying, "It was the mother of all demos."16 Based on my research, I think this is the source of the name "The Mother of All Demos" for Engelbart's demo.
By the end of the century, multiple publications echoed Levy's catchy phrase. In February 1999, the San Jose Mercury News had a special article on Engelbart, saying that the demonstration was "still called 'the mother of all demos'", a description echoed by the industry publication Computerworld.17 The book Nerds: A Brief History of the Internet stated that the demo "has entered legend as 'the mother of all demos'". By this point, Engelbart's fame for the "mother of all demos" was cemented and the phrase became near-obligatory when writing about him. The classic Silicon Valley history Fire in the Valley (1984), for example, didn't even mention Engelbart but in the second edition (2000), "The Mother of All Demos" had its own chapter.
Getting back to the keyset interface, the keyset consists of five microswitches, triggered by the five levers. The switches are wired to a standard DB-25 connector. I used a Teensy 3.6 microcontroller board for the interface, since this board can act both as a USB device and as a USB host. As a USB device, the Teensy can emulate a standard USB keyboard. As a USB host, the Teensy can receive input from a standard USB mouse.
Connecting the keyset to the Teensy is (almost) straightforward, wiring the switches to five data inputs on the Teensy and the common line connected to ground.
The Teensy's input lines can be configured with pullup resistors inside the microcontroller. The result is that a data line shows 1 by default and
0 when the corresponding key is pressed.
One complication is that the keyset apparently has a 1.5 kΩ between the leftmost button and ground, maybe to indicate that the device is plugged in.
This resistor caused that line to always appear low to the Teensy.
To counteract this and allow the Teensy to read the pin, I connected a 1 kΩ pullup resistor to that one line.
Reading the keyset and sending characters over USB is mostly straightforward, but there are a few complications. First, it's unlikely that the user will press multiple keyset buttons at exactly the same time. Moreover, the button contacts may bounce. To deal with this, I wait until the buttons have a stable value for 100 ms (a semi-arbitrary delay) before sending a key over USB.
The second complication is that with five keys, the keyset only supports 32 characters. To obtain upper case, numbers, special characters, and control characters, the keyset is designed to be used in conjunction with mouse buttons. Thus, the interface needs to act as a USB host, so I can plug in a USB mouse to the interface. If I want the mouse to be usable as a mouse, not just buttons in conjunction with the keyset, the interface mus forward mouse events over USB. But it's not that easy, since mouse clicks in conjunction with the keyset shouldn't be forwarded. Otherwise, unwanted clicks will happen while using the keyset.
To emulate a keyboard, the code uses the Keyboard library. This library provides
an API to send characters to the destination computer.
Inconveniently, the simplest method, print(), supports only regular characters, not special characters like ENTER or BACKSPACE. For those, I needed to
use the lower-level press() and release() methods.
To read the mouse buttons,
the code uses the USBHost_t36 library, the Teensy version of the USB Host library.
Finally, to pass mouse motion through to the destination computer, I use the Mouse library.
If you want to make your own keyset, Eric Schlaepfer has a model here.
Engelbart claimed that learning a keyset wasn't difficult—a six-year-old kid could learn it in less than a week—but I'm not willing to invest much time into learning it. In my brief use of the keyset, I found it very difficult to use physically. Pressing four keys at once is difficult, with the worst being all fingers except the ring finger. Combining this with a mouse button or two at the same time gave me the feeling that I was sight-reading a difficult piano piece. Maybe it becomes easier with use, but I noticed that Alto programs tended to treat the keyset as function keys, rather than a mechanism for typing with chords.18 David Liddle of Xerox PARC said, "We found that [the keyset] was tending to slow people down, once you got away from really hot [stuff] system programmers. It wasn't quite so good if you were giving it to other engineers, let alone clerical people and so on."
If anyone else has a keyset that they want to connect via USB (unlikely as it may be), my code is on github.19 Thanks to Christina Engelbart for loaning me the keyset. Thanks to Bill Paxton for answering my questions. Follow me on Bluesky (@righto.com) or RSS for updates.
Engelbart's use of the mouse wasn't arbitrary, but based on research. In 1966, shortly after inventing the mouse, Engelbart carried out a NASA-sponsored study that evaluated six input devices: two types of joysticks, a Graphacon positioner, the mouse, a light pen, and a control operated by the knees (leaving the hands free). The mouse, knee control, and light pen performed best, with users finding the mouse satisfying to use. Although inexperienced subjects had some trouble with the mouse, experienced subjects considered it the best device.
The information sheet below from the Augmentation Research Center shows what keyset chords correspond to each character. I used this encoding for my interface software. Each column corresponds to a different combination of mouse buttons.
The special characters above are <CD> (Command Delete, i.e. cancel a partially-entered command), <BC> (Backspace Character), <OK> (confirm command), <BW>(Backspace Word), <RC> (Replace Character), <ESC> (which does filename completion).
NLS and the Augment software have the concept of a viewspec, a view specification that controls the view of a file. For instance, viewspecs can expand or collapse an outline to show more or less detail, filter the content, or show authorship of sections. The keyset can select viewspecs, as shown below.
Viewsets are explained in more detail in The Mother of All Demos. For my keyset interface, I ignored viewspecs since I don't have software to use these inputs, but it would be easy to modify the code to output the desired viewspec characters.
See Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, Engelbart's 1962 report. ↩
Engelbart used an SDS 940 computer running the Berkeley Timesharing System. The computer had 64K words of core memory, with 4.5 MB of drum storage for swapping and 96 MB of disk storage for files. For displays, the computer drove twelve 5" high-resolution CRTs, but these weren't viewed directly. Instead, each CRT had a video camera pointed at it and the video was redisplayed on a larger display in a work station in each office.
The SDS 940 was a large 24-bit scientific computer, built by Scientific Data Systems. Although SDS built the first integrated-circuit-based commercial computer in 1965 (the SDS 92), the SDS 940 was a transistorized system. It consisted of multiple refrigerator-sized cabinets, as shown below. Since each memory cabinet held 16K words and the computer at SRI had 64K, SRI's computer had two additional cabinets of memory.
In the late 1960s, Xerox wanted to get into the computer industry, so Xerox bought Scientific Data Systems in 1969 for $900 million (about $8 billion in current dollars). The acquisition was a disaster. After steadily losing money, Xerox decided to exit the mainframe computer business in 1975. Xerox's CEO summed up the purchase: "With hindsight, we would not have done the same thing." ↩
The Mother of All Demos is on YouTube, as well as a five-minute summary for the impatient. ↩
The desk for the keyset and mouse was designed by Herman Miller, the office furniture company. Herman Miller worked with SRI to design the desks, chairs, and office walls as part of their plans for the office of the future. Herman Miller invented the cubicle office in 1964, creating a modern replacement for the commonly used open office arrangement. ↩
Engelbart's demo is famous now, but for many years it was ignored. For instance, Electronic Design had a long article on Engelbart's work in 1969 (putting the system on the cover), but there was no mention of the demo.
But by the 1980s, the Engelbart demo started getting attention. The 1986 documentary Silicon Valley Boomtown had a long section on Engelbart's work and the demo. By 1988, the New York Times was referring to the demo as legendary. ↩
Levy had written about Engelbart a decade earlier, in the May 1984 issue of the magazine Popular Computing. The article focused on the mouse, recently available to the public through the Apple Lisa and the IBM PC (as an option). The big issue at the time was how many buttons a mouse should have: three like Engelbart's mouse, the one button that Apple used, or two buttons as Bill Gates preferred. But Engelbart's larger vision also came through in Levy's interview along with his frustration that most of his research had been ignored, overshadowed by the mouse. Notably, there was no mention of Engelbart's 1968 demo in the article. ↩↩
The SRI researchers who moved to Xerox include Bill English, Charles Irby, Jeff Rulifson, Bill Duval, and Bill Paxton (details). ↩
In 2023, Xerox donated the entire Xerox PARC research center to SRI. The research center remained in Palo Alto but became part of SRI. In a sense, this closed the circle, since many of the people and ideas from SRI had gone to PARC in the 1970s. However, both PARC and SRI had changed radically since the 1970s, with the cutting edge of computer research moving elsewhere. ↩
For a detailed discussion of the Augment system, see Tymshare's Augment: Heralding a New Era, Oct 1978. Augment provided a "broad range of information handling capability" that was not available elsewhere. Unlike other word processing systems, Augment was targeted at the professional, not clerical workers, people who were "eager to explore the open-ended possibilities" of the interactive process.
The main complaints about Augment were its price and that it was not easy to use. Accessing Engelbart's NLS system over ARPANET cost an eye-watering $48,000 a year (over $300,000 a year in current dollars). Tymshare's Augment service was cheaper (about $80 an hour in current dollars), but still much more expensive than a standard word processing service.
Overall, the article found that Augment users were delighted with the system: "It is stimulating to belong to the electronic intelligentsia." Users found it to be "a way of life—an absorbing, enriching experience". ↩
William Safire provided background in the New York Times, explaining that "the mother of all battles" originally referred to the battle of Qadisiya in A.D. 636, and Saddam Hussein was referencing that ancient battle. A translator responded, however, that the Arabic expression would be better translated as "the great battle" than "the mother of all battles." ↩
The end of the Gulf War left Saddam Hussein in control of Iraq and left thousands of US troops in Saudi Arabia. These factors would turn out to be catastrophic in the following years. ↩
At the Mobile '92 conference, Apple's CEO, John Sculley, said personal communicators could be "the mother of all markets," while Andy Grove of Intel said that the idea of a wireless personal communicator in every pocket is "a pipe dream driven by greed" (link). In hindsight, Sculley was completely right and Grove was completely wrong. ↩
Some references to Intel's "Mother of all demos" are Computer Industry Gathers Amid Chaos, New York Times, Oct 21, 1991 and "Intel's High-Tech Vision of the Future: Chipmaker proposes using computers to dramatically improve productivity", San Francisco Chronicle, Oct 21, 1991, p24. The title of an article in Microprocessor Report, "Intel Declares Victory in the Mother of All Demos" (Nov. 20, 1991), alluded to the recently-ended war. Fortune wrote about Intel's demo in the Feb 17, 1997 issue. A longer description of Intel's demo is in the book Strategy is Destiny. ↩
Several sources claim that Andy van Dam was the first to call Engelbart's demo "The Mother of All Demos." Although van Dam attended the 1968 demo, I couldn't find any evidence that he coined the phrase. John Markoff, a technology journalist for The New York Times, wrote a book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. In this book, Markoff wrote about Engelbart's demo, saying "Years later, his talk remained 'the mother of all demos' in the words of Andries van Dam, a Brown University computer scientist." As far as I can tell, van Dam used the phrase but only after it had already been popularized by Levy. ↩
It's curious to write that the demonstration was still called the "mother of all demos" when the phrase was just a few years old. ↩
The photo below shows a keyset from the Xerox Alto. The five keys are labeled with separate functions—Copy, Undelete, Move, Draw, and Fine— for use with ALE, a program for IC design. ALE supported keyset chording in combination with the mouse.
After I implemented this interface, I came across a project that constructed a 3D-printed chording keyset, also using a Teensy for the USB interface. You can find that project here. ↩
Source: OSNews
What do SourceHut, GNOME’s GitLab, and KDE’s GitLab have in common, other than all three of them being forges? Well, it turns out all three of them have been dealing with immense amounts of traffic from “AI” scrapers, who are effectively performing DDoS attacks with such ferocity it’s bringing down the infrastructures of these major open source projects. Being open source, and thus publicly accessible, means these scrapers have unlimited access, unlike with proprietary projects.
These “AI” scrapers do not respect robots.txt, and have so many expensive endpoints it’s putting insane amounts of pressure on infrastructure. Of course, they use random user agents from an effectively infinite number of IP addresses. Blocking is a game of whack-a-mole you can’t win, and so the GNOME project is using a rather nuclear option called Anubis now, which aims to block “AI” scrapers with a heavy-handed approach that sometimes blocks real, genuine users as well.
The numbers are insane, as Niccolò Venerandi at Libre News details.
Over Mastodon, one GNOME sysadmin, Bart Piotrowski, kindly shared some numbers to let people fully understand the scope of the problem. According to him, in around two hours and a half they received 81k total requests, and out of those only 3% passed Anubi’s proof of work, hinting at 97% of the traffic being bots – an insane number!
↫ Niccolò Venerandi at Libre News
Fedora is another project dealing with these attacks, with infrastructure sometimes being down for weeks as a result. Inkscape, LWN, Frama Software, Diaspora, and many more – they’re all dealing with the same problem: the vast majority of the traffic to their websites and infrastructure now comes from attacks by “AI” scrapers. Sadly, there’s doesn’t seem to be a reliable way to defend against these attacks just yet, so sysadmins and webmasters are wasting a ton of time, money, and resources fending off the hungry “AI” hordes.
These “AI” companies are raking in billions and billions of dollars from investors and governments the world over, trying to build dead-end text generators while sucking up huge amounts of data and wasting massive amounts of resources from, in this case, open source projects. If no other solutions can be found, the end game here could be that open source projects will start to make their bug reporting tools and code repositories much harder and potentially even impossible to access without jumping through a massive amount of hoops.
Everything about this “AI” bubble is gross, and I can’t wait for this bubble to pop so a semblance of sanity can return to the technology world. Until the next hype train rolls into the station, of course.
As is tradition.
Source: Ars Technica
Source: Hack a Day
Somewhere between the period of 1999 and 2007 a plague swept through the world, devastating lives and businesses. Identified by a scourge of electrolytic capacitors violently exploding or splurging their liquid electrolyte guts all over the PCB, it led to a lot of finger pointing and accusations of stolen electrolyte formulas. In a recent video by [Asianometry] this story is summarized.
The bad electrolyte in the faulty capacitors lacked a suitable depolarizer, which resulted in more gas being produced, ultimately leading to build-up of pressure and the capacitor ultimately failing in a way that could be rather benign if the scored top worked as vent, or violently if not.
Other critical elements in the electrolyte are passivators, to protect the aluminium against the electrolyte’s effects. Although often blamed on a single employee stealing an (incomplete) Rubycon electrolyte formula, the video questions this narrative, as the problem was too widespread.
More likely it coincided with the introduction of low-ESR electrolytic capacitors, along with computers becoming increasingly more power-hungry, and thus stressing the capacitors in a much warmer environment than in the early 1990s. Combine this with the presence of counterfeit capacitors in the market and the truth of what happened to cause the Capacitor Plague probably involves a bit from each column, a narrative that seems to be the general consensus.
