Skimpy clothes can be stylish too. I don't really know of a modern TV series that goes that route anymore. So many things died - look at Married with children, the first five seasons. Such jokes are simply no longer made. It's strange how the world changed.
On youtube I recently had tons of auto-censoring where f*ck was removed in the audio with a bleep silent sound, but in the subtitles or in-titles, it was spelled out just fine. I hate censorship.
As for sexism, well - a male audience is more interested in certain elements. How high was the female audience percentage? Most probably were bored by the repetitive nature of that series. Always UFO and aliens. Dallas on the other hand, as TV show, had more elements, so a wider range of people were interested in it.
There's an entire industry of women's fiction made entirely of improbably bulging and muscular men (as seen on the cover, sometimes headless) with limitless drive and passion (as described, in physiological detail, in the text.)
Being dutifully concerned about miniskirts in a 60s TV show seems a little quaint in 2026.
That aside - UFO was originally sold as a show for kids, in the tradition of its predecessors, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, which were hugely popular.
The weirdness wasn't the sexy dresses - which were designed by the wife half of the co-production team - it's that it was clearly an adult show about adult themes with some toy franchise branding mixed in.
Some of the themes are still progressive today, like the episode about unconscious racism.
It was of its time, but so are most things, including the things being created and talked about today.
I watched it when I was a kid. I also liked it a lot, surprisingly enough.
Some things I liked about it:
- Intro music. One of the best for a TV series IMO. I also liked other
great intro music, such as Dallas, but never watched Dallas. Other great
intro themes are e. g. The Saints, and of course Tom and Jerry etc... (the
german intro though, that one was oddly enough better than the english one,
e. g. Udo Jürgens singing it. I always hated it when it was over.).
- The flashy outfits and colours. It looks like a joke today, but I liked
it back in the days.
- The futuristic models and style and design overall. It looks aged today,
but in the early 1980s it was great (I guess I watched reruns ... I was
not aware it was made in 1970, which can explain why it looked so dated
now).
- The main actor was kind of interesting looking, almost like an albino
in style.
One episodes I remember a bit was some cat ... or some great confusion.
I was confused too. That episode ended with the explanation that he was
confused by some alien or some cat as messenger. (If you are now confused
about it, this is all I remember and some scenes where the room was very
disordered. Normally the rooms are clean and ordered in the TV series).
Odd how only a few episodes were made, on IMDB it has very high rating.
Reminds me a bit of Twin Peaks. People kind of liked a lot about it but
some other things didn't win them over, so things get cancelled.
I think all AI projects should die, but if your question is aimed as to "why to publish it on github", then why not? Others could look at the code and learn from it (perhaps); and it is easier to distribute it that way too, in many cases. So I don't fully agree with the assumption that it would be automatically useless. Personally I won't use AI slop projects. It already annoys me to no ends that AI skynet successfully took over ruby development. I don't feel like even giving any feedback, as a few ruby devs such as Hiroshi Shibata, only interact with other beings via AI slop spam via claude; suddenly newly gained "perfect english language skills". It is all so fake now when AI infiltrates projects.
Not all AI-assisted projects are AI-slop. The fact that you think so only tells me that you’re deeply insecure about your knowledge of a subject that you’re interested in.
There is practically no other choice on a Z80. C compilers really don't like the Z80 ISA and create both slow and bloated output, at least compared to manually written asm. And on top, you can do many optimization tricks in assembly that simply are not possible in a high level language (self-modifying code, jumping into the middle of an instruction, etc...).
Forth might work better than C, but tbh, assembly code is more straightforward and easier to read than Forth ;)
I believe most of the 8bit microcontrollers from this era have no good optimizing compilers that get close to what competent practitioners achieve with assembly. I think it has to do with having complex addressing modes making the C stack fairly inefficient.
For an 8 bit Z80 based hardware project like this, assembly is a valid choice. The reason is performance. You'll lose significant performance with a compiler or interpreter.
The quickest way to redraw a screen or otherwise copy a memory region on Spectrum of is to use POP/PUSH instructions while flipping the stack pointer. Good luck getting that with C.
assembly is the only choice. The Z80 processor is a twisty collection of registers, none alike. It is pretty much the opposite of what a, for example, C compiler is looking for.
In fact C compilers are _notoriously_ bad at producing code for the Z80.
> modern science is synonymous with open source software
But why does the public have to pay for e. g. Elsevier? We pay for research of scientists already via taxpayers money (at the least in a civilized country), then we have to pay again for a private entity. If science is really open then it also needs to require public publishing. Gangsters such as Elsevier and others should not be able to drain the public here. Taxpayers financing something should also require public access to findings, at all times. Instead, Elsevier, Springer etc... get more public money while keeping things private. That's the antithesis to science.
100%. I'm not saying the vision we're talking about is there yet, I just think it's an enticing thought. The existence of (predatory) publishers is a sad and miserable joke in its own right.
Well, sometimes AI generates pictures that are not bad. Personally though I am tired of AI slop in general, and I don't want to support it. AI literally kills humans. In some scenarios AI is still useful (e. g. if you write a game, say, in javascript and you don't have any designers helping you out, you could generate images that don't suck, quickly, via AI) but other than that the less I get of AI the better. Google now has that problem with AI - tons of AI slop and fake videos. I realised the AI slop just wastes my time but Google does not offer a simple "do not show me any AI slop" videos. After all they want people to waste their time on youtube, by design. So I now waste my time twice by using Youtube, if I watch an AI slop video.
The question is whether you find it ok that the FBI comes sniffing after you. Personally I don't find it ok at all. I don't see any of that as a crime either. The legislation is clearly written by corporations and lobbyists acting as lawyers. That's another reason why I think open source is preferrable - that way they are replaced indirectly by not depending on them in the first place, meaning, as a trade-off towards how the society is currently structured. Hopefully it will become more sane again in the future. Back then, though, say in the 1990s or early 2000s, the "vibe" of warez also was "look how great ILLEGAL can be".
So if you steal something it means the owner didn’t do a good job securing it and if you murder someone they didn’t do a good job protecting themselves?
The diff is that owner is responsible for their own shit where a telco has everyone's things in there and is exposed to the whole world instead of just one street.
It is like a bank that has sloppy security and exposes you to the whole world, including adversaries from Russia china NK etc.
Things like Telco cloud banks should absolutely be thrashed for having bad security. Responsible disclosure should also be a thing but we all know these companies sue people for that too.
Does that extend to medical systems? If someone hacks my pacemaker and destabilizes my heart, or my pharmacy/hospital and prevents me from receiving medical care, is that something that should be legally permitted on the basis that "medical device makers/pharmacies/hospitals should try harder, and should somehow compensate their patients if a hack occurs"?
Since you mentioned it below several responses to this comment: Why do you think this is okay for software, but not okay in the "physical world"?
Is it about a perceived lack of consequences of the one vs the other? What if the hack caused real damage and suffering? For example, people's medical histories get stolen and exposed? Ransomware encrypts hospital systems, disrupting medical care?
Or, the inverse: while you're away, somebody breaks into your home non-destructively, takes some photos, sleeps on your couch, and leaves. Should that be forbidden? Your fault for allowing it? It is easier to pull something like this in the digital world, is that why it seems different to you?
I don't agree with GP at all, but making hacking illegal indeed gives companies a false sense of security.
Making burglaries illegal is a real way of preventing many burglaries from happening, because it puts people committing them in prison and deters some from doing it in the first place. This only works because the burglar is in the same place as the burglary, and so they can be arrested.
People with little to no computer experience apply the same standard to cybersecurity and treat foreign hackers the same way as burglars. Then they get surprised when the Russians hack them and the FBI does nothing.
You're presenting a false dilemma, there are more options than "all hacking is completely illegal" and "all hacking is a free-for-all".
We're in a thread that starts from the notion that it should not be illegal to "hack a telecom network and take control of it", because "the people running it did not do a good job configuring and securing it." That's essentially the free-for-all position, and defending it by claiming that the opposite extreme is the only other option is a false choice. Nuance and compromise exist, and our world is made of them.
Also, your argument about burglars can be applied to "hackers", too. Police can find and arrest people domestically and beyond. Consequences deter people from all sorts of illegal activity. On the other hand, nation states are not necessarily deterred by laws from kidnapping and killing people inside the territory of other countries. You've probably seen the news.
What's different is the ease of access to digitical, internet-connected systems, and the scale of abuse that affords. That's a reason to think differently about _how_ to shape the rules and laws around "hacking", but not a reason to have no rules or laws at all.
Because it is a battle of the brains, like when you play chess. And I believe the smarter one should win. This is why I have this strongly held belief that if you get hacked, it is on you. The attacker was smarter than you, simple as that. So you have to get smarter and become better. Or you get hacked again and again.
I really don’t understand the urge or need to compare software security with physical security.
> I really don’t understand the urge or need to compare software security with physical security.
Both are about preventing harm in many different forms. Software famously has effects in the physical world, that's the reason why a lot of it exists, and why people get paid that deal with software because it makes their brains feel good.
I also notice that you haven't really answered my questions around that.
> if you get hacked, it is on you. The attacker was smarter than you, simple as that.
From your perspective, what makes "smarter" different from "stronger", or "more resourceful" here? Or do you think that if your door gets bashed in, it's your fault, because your door was too weak? Or your head? What if someone outsmarts your physical security arrangements to wander around in your house? Where's your boundary here?
I think physical and "cyber" security are not so dissimilar in the need to back them up with rules and laws at some point. Still, there are differences, so I don't think the rules and laws need to be the same. You seem to be advocating to have none at all for the software case, and I'm trying to find out about that.
> Both are about preventing harm in many different forms. Software famously has effects in the physical world, that's the reason why a lot of it exists, and why people get paid that deal with software because it makes their brains feel good.
Yes, it would suck if the hospital got hacked while I underwent a surgery for example, and the ventilator stopped working. But if that happens, whoever is doing it is not stronger, just smarter than the people administering the hospital network.
> From your perspective, what makes "smarter" different from "stronger", or "more resourceful" here? Or do you think that if your door gets bashed in, it's your fault, because your door was too weak? Or your head? What if someone outsmarts your physical security arrangements to wander around in your house? Where's your boundary here?
I gave an analogy with chess. You don't have to be strong in the physical sense to win a chess match, just smarter than your opponent. This is how I see the difference.
> You seem to be advocating to have none at all for the software case, and I'm trying to find out about that.
For software, the playing field is level: you use a computer, your opponent uses a computer. But the difference is the other person's capabilities. You can be smarter and you don't get hacked, or your opponent is smarter and hacks you.
You don’t have to be smarter than your opponent to beat them in chess. You need to be better at chess, that’s it. Sure you need some degree of intelligence to be good at chess but being better at chess is not an indicator that you are smarter than your opponent. Same goes for computer security or any other intellectual field.
For instance, I’m pretty sure I’m better at computer security than Terence Tao but no way would I say I’m smarter than him.
My issue is that software security is not taken seriously most of the time because features are more important than spending a little more time on code quality.
I switched to linux in 2004 or so. All those old use cases kind of vanished or changed. Perhaps the subset of software is more limited on linux, since Microsoft
also builds - and exploits - a platform for commercial success, but I see more and more linux-specific applications too, typically using qt5 or qt6. Which is interesting considering linux does not have a huge share here. I guess there does exist some market value here.
I just can not really see myself using or needing "warez" on linux - the use cases are sooooo different now. For multimedia there are very few use cases not covered by ffmpeg and mpv. The only thing I'd like is something like avisynth, but more like a domain specific language that is even shorter. I remember back in early 2004 or late 2003 I was still writing avisynth scripts to modify video data on windows. Linux pipes never really went into an object-oriented approach and view onto data.
> I just can not really see myself using or needing "warez" on linux
I remember switching to Linux around 94 and at the time one of the things that annoyed me was that there was very little commercial software to patch registration checks out of!
There were a couple of image-viewers, and similar things, but I fell out of the habit of decompiling random binaries, and stopped keeping up with the newere techqniques for a good few years. My reversing skills came back, later, but swithching to Linux where everything was "free" and source was mostly available really did change a lot of my computer-related hobbies.
Cats are not really domesticated. I've heard various terms but semi-domesticated probably serves. They're very adaptable but not pack animals. You're sort of safe with house cats because they're small. You get less safe as the body weight goes up the scale.
It’s funny to hear they are not pack animals. I’m sure that is technically the case, especially in the wild, but my house cats definitely cling to me and follow me around like I am their leader. They groom/fight to try to establish a hierarchy below me, and when my partner comes home from work immediately switch allegiance to her, who they clearly see as the dominant mammal in the house.
They don’t go outside (they can’t really, it’s too busy by the road here and they’d decimate the wildlife, but I live with it because ultimately we’re doing them a huge favor by giving them a home, post-rescue) so I am sure that has something to do with it. Perhaps infantilism is keeping them in this pack headspace? But even then my mother’s cat — rural, murderous, tough tabby tom — treats her like a god and the rest of us as an annoyance.
I have 2 cats that are sisters. They have a very interesting dynamic. There isn't a fixed dominant sibling, they switch back and forth.
They antagonise each-other most of the time, but they also support each other in times of stress. If one goes to the vet and the other doesn't, the initial reaction is hissing and being a dick. Then, after a few minutes, it's licking and comforting.
I don't like to anthropomorphise too much, but they definitely look out for each-other. Equally, they definitely annoy each-other.
As I wrote, they're adaptable. But there's a difference between true pack animals with an established hierarchy and being solitary but being open to other cats and species. Certainly, some cats are more pack-like (lions) and others are, or are more open to, being largely solitary.
Domestic cats, are pack animals under some conditions.
Those and lions are the only cats known that don't mind to tolerate friends and non relatives around in their territories, cats clearly enjoy the company, form hierarchies and share food. Hyaenas and mongooses are related with cats and definitely social also. Lingsangs on the other way, are solitary.
my cat at its peak weight is about 8kg, and that's the size that i'd get a bit nervous around if i didn't know it's a tame housecat that runs away at sight of a mouse...
>"I'd be getting scared when a cat reaches the 20kg threshold" - most likely even 10kg cat will shred you before you could blink. They're insanely fast and surprisingly strong for size. Furry explosives they are
An angry cat in full fight mode will absolutely put a human in hospital, and the bites and scratches are teeming with potentially deadly bacteria.
They may be unique - a super-successful predator that has persuaded a more dominant species to look after it by looking cute and feeling soft and making relaxing noises.
My newest cat started as a stray. Cautious around humans, but not feral. He was hanging around a lot, so of course I started giving him food because I’m a sucker that way. He disappeared for a couple months, then showed up injured from a fight one day, so we took him to the hospital and ended up keeping him in the garage for a few days to recover. We also did the usual due diligence to locate an owner.
The rest, of course, is history. Now he’s a big 20lb goober of a cat who is positively enamored with my wife. The feeling is mutual.
There was a farm nearby where a mother cat died and all but two kittens died from hunger afterwards. We adopted one, my wife fed the kitten (which was way underage for adopting) with bottle.
Now she has been with us for years. She’s very loyal to me, dismissive to aggressive to anyone else. Not sure why me and not my wife, but hey :)
She basically sleeps next to me all the time, both when I work from home or at night. She’s 14 now, no medical issues.
If they do not have a developed prefrontal cortex acting as a filter from instinct to action, they will be nice or calm for a long time - until the whim occurs and they will act violently. Maybe just for a fraction of a second. And at that point, their strength and natural weapon will make a whole difference.
I've watched a lot of horror shows that had no effect on me. But this one wasn't a horror show, it was for real. I found it very disturbing. I couldn't believe what I was watching.
I think the lady that got mauled to death in 2018 at the lion preserve that guy works at might disagree with you if she hadn’t been y’know, mauled to death by a lion.
FTFA: "The man took the animal home, believing it to be a domestic breed. But after about a year of living with the clearly wild animal, he realized it would be better off at a sanctuary."
There's a YouTube (and other) channel out there about a guy and his (I use the possessive with caveats) coyote (named Weave). His motto is "Anything can be a pet if you don’t mind getting bit."
On youtube I recently had tons of auto-censoring where f*ck was removed in the audio with a bleep silent sound, but in the subtitles or in-titles, it was spelled out just fine. I hate censorship.
As for sexism, well - a male audience is more interested in certain elements. How high was the female audience percentage? Most probably were bored by the repetitive nature of that series. Always UFO and aliens. Dallas on the other hand, as TV show, had more elements, so a wider range of people were interested in it.
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