Molly White - https://www.citationneeded.news

I’ve voted in every election since Bush senior in 1988 and I do not believe the other guy is speaking hyperbolically at all. It’s so different this time. It truly is.

If you don’t have upvotes and downvotes turned on then I’m even more confused why you let them influence how you comment.

Yeah thats why i opt for low effort comments because even if you’re right you’re downvoted

A day later and I notice that your low effort comment was downvoted, but the other comment with detail and explanation is 9:1 upvoted. Maybe it’s the low effort part that’s earning you the downvotes and not the underlying opinion.

Lemmy community is garbo.

All you post and all you read is all this place will ever be (apologies to Pink Floyd).

I like the advice others have given, particularly the “no kids” suggestion. If one of your core interests is raising kids, of course, you’re in for a wild ride. But if raising kids isn’t one of your core interests, then give it a good long think. There’s no rule that says you have to have kids. I’m in my mid 50’s, happily married, never had kids and it was a great decision. Zero regrets. Leading a full life.

I also suggest taking a long-term perspective when you’re trying to balance how you use your time. The circumstances of your life are going to hinder and enable all your interests in various ways over your life. Lean into that. There are core interests of mine that I’ve shelved for years at a time only to later revisit in a new way when my priorities re-aligned.

On the long run, it’s all been balanced.

It’s great you’re thinking about these things. The unexamined life is not worth living (said Socrates). But please don’t feel overwhelmed. The great thing about this dilemma is that you’re the one who gets to decide if it works out in the end.

21 minutes was the transfer time at 2400 baud but you used the 300 baud price. $7.88 to see it at $22.50/hour.

$36.25 to see it at 300 baud (174 minutes at $12.50/hour)

BBS lists were published in computer magazines and on other BBS systems in the same area code, generally. Once you found one you quickly found links to others in your area.

Some guy in your city would just leave his computer on all day and you could call it over a regular phone line with your modem. Only one person at a time could connect and if someone else was on that board you just got a busy signal.

Terminal software and later modems themselves had “autodial” features that would keep trying to call until they eventually connected, so if you wanted to call a specific board you’d just wait while your computer dialed and hung up and dialed and hung up over and over again until it heard a modem on the other end. It was a huge technical innovation when US Robotics invented a modem that could detect the busy signal, allowing it to try the next attempt much sooner. Earlier modems just waited 30 seconds for either a connection or nothing and timed out before trying again.

In the late 80s BBS software started supporting interconnections where you could call your local BBS and send an email to a user on a completely different BBS, even in a different city. This could take multiple days to send and then more days again for any potential reply. It felt like Star Trek at the time.

I just went through a house move and unearthed a spiral-bound CompuServe user’s manual from 1985. I have hand-written notes on the inside cover with the billing rates around that time. Cost was broken down in two tiers, prime time and after hours and then further by the speed you connected.

300 baud cost $12.50/hour in prime time and $6/hour in the evenings. 1200 baud cost $15 and $12.50. 2400 baud cost $22.50 and $19. Minimum wage at the time was $3.35/hour. Inflation-adjusted that’s $55/hour for a 2400 baud prime time connection.

2400 baud modems were brand new in '85 and it would still be a few years before they were widely used. I’d been running a BBS since '82 so I always wanted to be ahead of the curve for speed and compatibility.

This was sort of the beginning of the end for CompuServe’s real success. 1985 was also when local BBSs started to figure out how to federate and link up. FidoNet was really starting to take off and if you were a CS Major you probably had access to the proto-internet in the computer lab on campus at your college. It wouldn’t be until 1990 before the first search engine existed, though.

I took a bunch of terrible photos of the book but then found that Internet Archive has the whole thing scanned in great quality.

Here’s some photos of the book I have here because the artifact is kinda cool just itself: https://imgur.com/a/XQWi9cK

Here’s the scan: https://archive.org/details/compu-serve-information-service-users-guide/mode/2up

That first photo on Imgur of the book’s cover is 3.1mb. It would take 174 minutes to download that file at 300 baud. A blistering 21 minutes at 2400 baud. It would require 3 floppy disks to store it.

The text of this Lemmy post? 1,884 bytes which would take 6.3 seconds to send at 300 baud.

The Karate Kid was released 40 years ago

And now guyrocket is too embarrassed to admit they thought they were making a funny joke and didn’t realize they were 32 years too late to the punchline.

I don’t think I’ve ever been exposed to either. I mean, I know they exist, but I’ve never watched or read either and none of my peer group does (that I know of)

Found the hate!

I believe the other commenter was saying that initially Tesla’s only competition was lacking (“basically like the Leaf”), not saying that the Tesla product was.

Now that Tesla faces credible competition from other automakers, they face a much steeper challenge to retain their market share.