I don’t think anyone called those “web apps” though. I sure didn’t.

As I recall, the phrase didn’t enter common usage until the advent of AJAX, which allowed for dynamically loading data without loading or re-loading a whole page. Early webmail sites simply loaded a new page every time you clicked a link. They didn’t even need JavaScript.

The term “web app” hadn’t been coined yet but, even without AJAX I think in retrospect it’s reasonable to call things like the early versions of Hotmail and RocketMail applications - they were functional replacements for a native application, on the web, even though they did require a new page load for every click (or at least every click that required network interaction).

At some point, though, I’m pretty sure that some clicks didn’t require server connections, and those didn’t require another page load (at least if js was enabled): this is what “DHTML” originally meant: using JavaScript to modify the DOM client-side, in the era before sans-page-reload network connections were technically possible.

The term DHTML definitely predates AJAX and the existence of XMLHTTP (later XMLHttpRequest), so it’s also odd that this article writes a lot about the former while not mentioning the latter. (The article actually incorrectly defines DHTML as making possible “websites that could refresh interactive data without the need for a page reload” - that was AJAX, not DHTML.)

Weird this article doesn’t mention Hotmail and RocketMail, which both had email client web apps in 1996.

Python does have a year option that they are not using.

No, it doesn’t:

Help on class timedelta in module datetime:

class timedelta(builtins.object)
 |  Difference between two datetime values.
 |
 |  timedelta(days=0, seconds=0, microseconds=0, milliseconds=0, minutes=0, hours=0, weeks=0)
 |
 |  All arguments are optional and default to 0.
 |  Arguments may be integers or floats, and may be positive or negative.

I bought some cheap Chinese 2-way radios. The packaging has a big American flag and a “Designed in U.S.A.” claim, which I suspect is bullshit given the company involved. Also, there are two Bible verses referenced. This smacks of pandering to a particular slice of conservative Americans. All I want is cheap radios for skiing with my kids next winter, not a reminder of my country’s socio-political bullshit.

This bullshit is not from the well-known Chinese radio maker Baofeng (baofengradio.com) but rather from a US company called “BTech” which has the deceptive URL BaoFengTech.com.

Can someone tell me what vibe coding is?

a term coined 6 months ago for writing software using an LLM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding

No evidence of this happened. Blocked.

lol what? it is a pretty well-sourced article, with the main source being remarks in a video which it helpfully links to.

it is 10h long but on youtube one can search the transcript and easily find the parts that form the basis of this article: here are Secretary Burgum’s comments and here is Porat referencing them later.

in US english posh is a synonym for british

/s (½)

OC? 🥂 to whoever made this in any case :)

(for those who don’t know, it’s based on xkcd#2347)

ADB slightly predated (and is arguably technically superior to) the PS/2 mouse and keyboard interfaces, but Apple patented it and the only companies that licensed it were those making Mac peripherals.

edit: i forgot, NeXT also used it.

With the Mac SE and II, the switched to ADB, which looked like a PS/2 port, but you could daisy chain your mouse, keyboard, and other inputs like tablets or joysticks all into one jack in the back of the computer.

The port looks similar - both are mini-DIN - but ADB has four pins while PS/2 has six.

ADB was first introduced in 1986 on the Apple IIgs, and later was used in all Macs from the SE until the iMac. For the first few years there were two ADB ports, but in 1990 (maybe starting with the Mac IIsi?) they reduced it to one and started shipping keyboards with ports to daisy chain the mouse from.

It’s a picture of the ADB ports (for mouse and keyboard, but not only…) on a Mac IIci.

some more history:

April 2023: Substack CEO Chris Best Doesn’t Realize He’s Just Become The Nazi Bar

December 2023: Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign

(via)

(it’s either something like this, or OP elided the word “audience”)

not only a racist but also a misogynist, a present-day gamergater, who is literally in 2025 still complaining that “video games used to be made for guys and now they’re made for everyone” 🤦

This article buries the lede so much that many readers probably miss it completely: the important takeaway here, which is clearer in The Register’s version of the story, is that ChatGPT cannot actually play chess:

“Despite being given a baseline board layout to identify pieces, ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks, and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were."

To actually use an LLM as a chess engine without the kind of manual intervention that this person did, you would need to combine it with some other software to automate continuing to ask it for a different next move every time it suggests an invalid one. And, if you did that, it would still mostly lose, even to much older chess engines than Atari’s Video Chess.

edit: i see now that numerous people have done this; you can find many websites where you can “play chess against chatgpt” (which actually means: with chatgpt and also some other mechanism to enforce the rules). and if you know how to play chess you should easily win :)