>Even if only a tiny subset of any population has the cognitive surplus to meddle with programming and math, they had easy access to fulfill that and be found.
This is exactly 100% not true. Source: I grew up behind the Iron Curtain. Why some people are so ready to glamorize poverty and restrictions, I don't even understand.
Not every school had computers, and those which do, often had the fear of something being broken as the main guiding principle. Sure, some teachers were understanding and gaining their trust you could get some time for experiments. But it was rare. In a school "where there was no traffic lights" you would definitely find no "robotic arms" really (I can't even guess where this sci-fi bs came from). And you would rather only allowed to press spacebar when told so under close supervision.
Getting a computer at home wasn't easy either. That DIY culture appeared from the need more than from fun, but it wasn't available for all anyway. Knowing how-to is a barrier in itself for a kid, but try getting all necessary parts at first. Those were societies of constant "defitsit", and one needed connections and/or good money to obtain even simple things. On my block there were exactly 1 kid with self-built computer and you would need to fight for his favors. And anyway those machines were often more like primitive gaming consoles with very limited programming possible.
So in fact majority of late-socialism programming enthusiats grew in families where parents could bring their children to the work and let them play with computers there. Which is minority of minority.
I wrote from personal experience. In 1992 in a fisherman town we had a robotic arm and Pravetz 8 and 16 computers with the 5 inch floppy disks. We had to use Basic to program the arm and it was only doing basic movements. The teacher had a 16 year old who was assisting with the lab and you did have to ask for permission to do stuff.
I'm glad you were that lucky! I was lucky too, my father had computer at work. Maybe that's why we met here. I guess it would be better if written with 'me' and not 'they'
The fun fact was that the 16 year old that passionately administered the lab was also hitting on any female students who went in there, essentially chasing them away. I suspect the number of techies would double if it wasn’t for all the bad behavior.
I was fortunate in that Internet cafes started happening and I could volunteer to administer networks and troubleshooting for them while getting PC time for free. I also maintained PCs for friends with businesses who could afford one. So the Pravetz sparked my curiosity but the real growth happened on begged and borrowed time from other peoples computers.
>ROBKO 01 is an anthropoid robot manufactured in Bulgaria by BAS (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) and produced by the Medical Equipment Factories. It is an analog based on the manufactured in the USA Armdroid 1000. The two robot arms are completely the same, except some minor differences in the mechanics and drive circuitry.
> Why some people are so ready to glamorize poverty and restrictions, I don't even understand.
> Not every school had computers, and those which do, often had the fear of something being broken as the main guiding principle
People glamorize exotic places they don't know, and you're doing exactly this here: I grew up in the 90s in the suburb of Paris (not in a poor neighborhood) and we didn't have a single computer in school until. And even later in high school in the early 2000, we had few computers in dedicated rooms the teacher had to book in advance and often not all computer worked.
The West was much better that the eastern block in many aspects, but it wasn't the land of unlimited abundance some people from the East believed it was.
I didn't mention Paris, or even West in general though. Made zero comparisons. The whole text is about the place where I lived. So I'm not sure how did I manage to glamorize something
When you say “Not every school had computers” as a rebuttal without realizing that pretty much no school in a bunch other countries elsewhere in Europe had computers at the time.
Exchanging e.g. grains for beef is not 'lost' anything, even if theoretically the former gives more calories. Nutritionally beef is just more valuable. Calories isn't the only thing we need apparently.
Trust is undef unless assessed within a context. We have zero reasons to trust more or less any vendor's firmware/hardware because they are unauditable. But from experience we can say it works most of the time and there's no discernible difference between Lenovo, Dell, or Apple
I don't get what they have been ironically saying. Direct reading suggests it's that Linux is like Windows in 2000 but it doesn't make sense to me, I never heard a comparison like that.
You are answering different question. What you are saying is called awareness campaign or something. Enforcement of seatbelts is done by police with fines/tickets and is possible cause it's visible from outside.
Other things like loudness levels inside cars cannot be monitored without going in full totalitarian mode.
Why would enforcement be necessary, given assumptions 1 and 2 (not stupid, not murderers), and awareness? Around these parts, seatbelt enforcement isn't necessary because everyone voluntarily wears their seatbelt – except for children, occasionally, but the adults are generally capable of enforcing that. (Even teenagers / young adults being irresponsible in cars generally wear seatbelts while doing so.)
Cause humans works that way. We don't calculate risks based on statistics in everyday life. That means you can't just make people aware, you need to build cultural norm around that. But cultural norms without enforcement are easy to erode. When norm is systematically broken it ceases to be norm.
>seatbelt enforcement isn't necessary because everyone voluntarily wears their seatbelt
You obviously don't travel much. There are whole countries where seatbelts are rarely used, and drivers buy special plugs for belt receptacles to silence beeping.
It's impossible to generalize over free vs paid in regard to predictability. E.g. a provider I paid for simply disappeared once when I was quite busy while my old free gmail still works. Realistically CF's free tier is more predictable than many paid options on market.
My threat model here focuses on what the provider gets out of the free tier. Cloudflare gets a broad view into activity on the internet for building the models they use for their paid offerings. Free Gmail puts people on a path in to Google's ecosystem with basically zero marginal cost.
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