Mastodawn

These governmental attestation requirements popping up all over the world are nothing but a visible escalation step in the war on generic computing.

@pluralistic spoke about it in 2011 and here's a nice transcript for you https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Computation

I'm not modest enough to not say I was also looking at those writings in the wall, but he's a much better speaker.

Go read that, and please, please, please...

Stop collaborating with the authoritarians.

The Coming War on General Computation - Wikisource, the free online library

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R. Sabourin Mar 15

@RuiSeabra @pluralistic
Computers are enshittifying at every level. This might be my next purchase.

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Rupert Reynolds Mar 16

@rsabourin @RuiSeabra @pluralistic This is smaller, but it won't boot Linux, so what's the point? ;-)

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Mark Crocker Mar 16

@RupertReynolds @rsabourin @RuiSeabra @pluralistic I own one of these Curta Calculators. The same model. I drag it out from time to time, when I need to do simple calculations.

The square root algorithm is enough of a PITA that I only used it once after learning it.

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Rupert Reynolds Mar 16

@mcrocker @rsabourin @RuiSeabra @pluralistic I never tried square root. That was bad enough on my first electronic calculator, which only had +-*/ and a memory register.

I like the way that if I subtracted one time too many, I could go into reverse and 'undo' the mistake :-)

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cpm

@RupertReynolds
i used to own a basic curta,
early sn#

did all the problems in the book.

square/cubes, and respective roots become intuitive with practice.

@mcrocker @rsabourin @RuiSeabra @pluralistic