You know, that's exactly how I learned to program.
I started up QBasic knowing nothing other than that it seemed like a thing for programming computers and programming seemed like a cool thing to do.
I typed in random words, and eventually I typed "screen". When I pushed enter, QBasic capitalized it, so it seemed important. I hit F1 and read the help. It made no sense, but the example ran and had other capitalized words so I could repeat the process.
Eventually I started making really terrible text-based Final Fantasy knock-offs.
Wow, that’s exactly my memory. As far as my family was concerned I was spending day and night in front of the “blue screen”. I got as far as programming a GUI by copying windows 95 pixel by pixel, text editor, fonts, cd player, minesweeper. I wish I had the code.
When we were teenagers, one of my friends lit a guitar pick on fire. It was a lot more exciting than we expected! We thought it'd just shrivel up and melt, but instead it was like the pick was made of solid rocket fuel.
He was around 40 years old when he said it and he wasn't talking about smartphones - at least what we call smartphones today.
> "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone".
> I said that after a frustrating attempt to use a "feature-rich" telephone sometime around 1990. I'm sure the sentiment wasn't original, and probably not even the overall phrasing; someone must have thought of that before me.
He worked for AT&T at the time, right? Those corporate PBX systems had all sorts of crazy features which people mastered by pounding the 12 keys really fast. And he was probably on the bleeding edge of that. (In many places digital voice mail commonly predated email.)
edit to agree: obv Stroustrup in 1990 was not talking about your cell phone.
Just recently I wanted to change the default AI assistant from Gemini to Perplexity and after having found the option once, somehow, it took me ages to find it again.
For what it's worth, I've read both Bostrom's Superintelligence and AI 2027. Reading Superintelligence was interesting and for me really drove home how hard setting aligned goals for an AI is, but the timelines seemed far enough out that it wasn't likely to be something that would matter in my lifetime.
AI 2027 was much more impactful on me. It probably helps that I read it the same week I started playing with agent mode on GitHub Copilot. Seeing what AI can already do, especially compared to six months ago, and then seeing their projections made AI seem like something much more worth paying attention to.
Yeah, getting from here to being killed by rogue AI nanobots in less than five years still seems pretty far fetched to me. But, each of the steps in their scenario didn't seem completely outside the realm of possiblity.
So for me personally, my 80% confidence interval includes both things stagnating pretty much where they are now, but also something more like AI 2027. I suspect we'll be fine, but AGI seems like a real enough possibility that it's worth working on a contingency plan.
This was back when Internet Explorer was at version 7. Some Mozilla folks told me they used to get questions like "when are you going to upgrade to Internet 7 like Microsoft?"
If I remember right, after Firefox 4 they skipped a few versions and started the train model, while also trying to de-emphasize the version number in marketing.
This is very likely because Thunderbird uses mbox files, so one big text file per mail folder. There is experimental maildir support (one file for each email) which is friendlier for AVs: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/maildir-thunderbird
> One (whatever big) file is always way more 'friendlier' for the AV than a bazillion of files.
Defender will scan the entire file on opening if it's been modified. So for an mbox file, any update to the mbox (e.g. adding a message or marking one as read) will lead Defender to block reading until it's scanned it in full again.
While maildir will increase the baseline costs because opening files in windows is expensive, it will drastically reduce AV overhead, because the AV has a lot less data to scan, and it will only scan files which have been modified.
> Defender will scan the entire file on opening if it's been modified
In that case it would delete the whole mailbox for EICAR. Sound plausible, but I have a WinSvr2022 machine without WinDefender (or any other AV) and Thunderbird there is slow as molasses.
But sure, if adding the path to the exclusions alleviate the problem then it's Defender causing issues.
> because opening files in windows is expensive
Yes, this is the reason I would generally advise against that. Also it mess up NTFS fragmentation bad and while nowadays it's less of an issue for a laptop with oh so fast NVMe drive in it, it's still a problem (especially if you later need to move that folder with a bazillion files in it).
Why, exactly? I have switched to maildir as soon as it was available as experimental feature, and performance gains when compared to mbox were enormous, especially during bulk operations. Switching folders takes <0.1s, with ~100k messages per folder, on Windows 7 64-bit.
The logic is probably as discussed above. Opening files is relatively expensive on Windows, so intuitively, maildir should be worse in terms of performance. I believe there's also some filesystem reasons to prefer avoiding lots of small files but that's beyond my pay-grade.
The reason maildir is faster despite this is the antivirus factor.
The fastest solution is adding an exception so that Defender doesn't scan your Thunderbird email, however that has the trade off that your antivirus isn't able to scan your email.
And while switching folders, which is the major part of UX anyway, is fast, because TB only scans a handful of messages in the view[0], what about other operations which would need to scan the entire mailbox, like searching for something?
[0] why even it does that? beats me, but clearly it does, otherwise you wouldn't see the speed improvement
This. Took me some time until I figured this out. I would definitely not discover this if I was a new user, but I migrated my profile from linux where everything was fast (with the same mailbox) so I was suspicious.
As I understand it, before you open a (potentially dangerous) attachment in another app, it would be saved to your Temp or Downloads folder, where Defender would still have access.
A carefully crafted email (or PDF attachment) that exploits vulnerabilities within Thunderbird's HTML or image rendering (or its PDF.js sandbox) might still pose a risk, but probably less so than any random web page that you open in Firefox, where JS (which should be disabled in Thunderbird by default) is the primary attack vector.
Also, note that there is a setting called "Allow antivirus clients to quarantine individual incoming messages". With this enabled, "Thunderbird first stores each incoming message in a temporary file in the system temp folder" (where Defender would have access). "If the new message file still exists after being scanned by the antivirus software, then it is moved to your Thunderbird Inbox folder file." [1] If this is implemented correctly, it should only impact performance when receiving new emails.
Where the email is stored.
I'd say there is little impact as when a malicious email ends on disk, it was processed and the potential damage has been done already. I trust the server-side filtering and thunderbird security more than file-access protection in defender
In response to both comments: I turned on "Allow antivirus clients to quarantine individual incoming messages" and then added an exception for the folder where Thunderbird is keeping my mail, and it's now noticeably snappier—not instant, but opening my archives folder (~35,000 messages) was previously anywhere from a couple seconds to a couple dozen of seconds, and is now probably a little under a second.
Firefox adopted rapid version numbers basically because the rest of the browsers did. For years Firefox was on 3.something, and they'd get questions from people saying things like "Microsoft is already on Internet 7, when are you going to support Internet 7?" If I recall right, Firefox skipped versions 5 and 6, and starting with 7 they decided to use a rapid version number scheme and deemphasize version numbers in their marketing.
I'd be really interested to see a comparison of the relative risks between skin cancer and vitamin D deficiency.
A lot of what I've read lately suggests we're discovering a lot of benefits of vitamin D that were previously unknown, and some evidence that the recommended vitamin D levels should be higher than they are.
For a generation or so we've told people the sun is dangerous because of skin cancer, and obviously skin cancer is really bad. But I wonder if we have a case of need to weight risks that are high cost, low probability (skin cancer) compared with low cost, high probability (low vitamins D complications). What is the overall effect of these two things?
Short excerpt:
People don’t realize this because several different diseases are lumped together under the term “skin cancer.” The most common by far are basal-cell carcinomas and squamous-cell carcinomas, which are almost never fatal. In fact, says Weller, “When I diagnose a basal-cell skin cancer in a patient, the first thing I say is congratulations, because you’re walking out of my office with a longer life expectancy than when you walked in.” That’s probably because people who get carcinomas, which are strongly linked to sun exposure, tend to be healthy types that are outside getting plenty of exercise and sunlight.
> The most common by far are basal-cell carcinomas and squamous-cell carcinomas, which are almost never fatal.
My grandpa died due to complications from a basal-cell skin cancer. He was almost 90 years old. The cancer itself was a few decades old. He served in the Navy during WWII, and likely got it from years of tropical sun exposure with no sunscreen.*
So, yeah, as far as cancers go, that's one you'd rather get if given a choice.
* (Well, and the additional years of fishing and other outdoor activities. Obviously the cause can't be pinpointed like that, but it must have contributed)
I started up QBasic knowing nothing other than that it seemed like a thing for programming computers and programming seemed like a cool thing to do.
I typed in random words, and eventually I typed "screen". When I pushed enter, QBasic capitalized it, so it seemed important. I hit F1 and read the help. It made no sense, but the example ran and had other capitalized words so I could repeat the process.
Eventually I started making really terrible text-based Final Fantasy knock-offs.