I ran BeOS as a daily driver for a few months in the early 2000s. I had a winmodem and Linux couldn't connect to the internet for me, but for some reason, BeOS had drivers, so I used it. It was faster and the desktop environment felt more polished than KDE/Gnome.
Of course, at that time, it was impossible to know which OS would win the wars, so BeOS became my favorite. However, Linux developed very quickly during those years, I got into college and started using UNIX there, winmodem drivers appeared, and that's what I ended up using.
But BeOS still holds a very dear place in my heart. It really was superior to anything else during that era.
What set it apart was the out of the way UX and clean fast experience. It was a real time kernal to boot. I think korg used it on some of their synth products or something even.
To me the UX and experience on it was (still) ahead of its time. It ran stuff on a Pentium 90 like it was a 400mhz beast running NT.
I do hear my heartbeat from my left ear. The ear doctor said that the ear can be sensitive to the blood flowing from nearby arteries, and that there's nothing to do. Stress affects the heartbeat volume. I just got used to it, but it can be annoying sometimes, especially when you're trying to enjoy the silence.
The doctor also told me that it's not an ear problem, but rather a brain problem. The brain is supposed to filter out this noise, in the same sense that it filters out the sounds from a (normal) digestion, our breathing, etc. I do have some (undiagnosed) hypersensitivity, so that sounds consistent to me.
nozzlegear: it gets better with time, the less you think about it. I know it's not a great consolation, but trust me, train yourself not to think about it, and it will go away for extended periods of time (and will come back from time to time)
This is the first time I heard that this is an issue where the brain isn't filtering out noise properly. This explains why I have had tinnitus, the sound of breathing, whooshing in the ears from my heartbeat, etc. audible to me for as long as I've been conscious and have never understood why everyone else seemed to be really disturbed by what I consider to be supremely normal. Except I also have a sensory processing disorder that makes my brain unable to filter input well so I also come off as sensitive to touch and able to pick up smells well. Because I grew up with all this though I have normalized it enough to function.
I have this also in the left ear for about a year or so. I self-diagnosed it as eustachian tube related [0] and should really see a doctor, but I also got pretty used to it by now. Only now and then it gets a bit annoying when the sound become more 'whooshing' than 'a clock ticking in the room'.
In my right ear I have another sound regularly, that I went to the doctor for, and she immediately said "Oh, tinnitus, nothing you can do". But I'm pretty sure it is something else. It feels like spasmic tiny muscle fluctuating against my eardrum, and gets triggered by a low-frequency sound, esp. when at rest. Stops after 15-30 mins.
I built a chatbot startup in 2015. It integrated with Whatsapp (which was possible at the time with some hacks), and had:
- Multimodality: Text/audio/images input and output. Integrated OCR.
- Connection with an asterisk server, it could send and receive voice phone calls! I used it to call for pizzas to a local place via whatsapp. This was prior to Google's famous demo calling a hairdresser to book a haircut.
- It understood humor and message sentiment, told jokes and sometimes even chimed in with a "haha" if somebody said something funny in a group chat or sent an appropriate gif reaction
- Memory (facts database)
- Useful features such as scheduling, polling, translations, image search, etc.
Regarding the tech, I used external models (Watson was pretty good at the time), plus classical NLP processing and symbolic reasoning that I learned in college.
Nobody understood the point of it (where's the GUI? how do I know what to ask it? customers asked) and I didn't make a single dime out of the project. I closed it a couple years later. Sometimes I wonder what could've been of it.
An actual explanation of what the software does, from their Github repo
> WinBoat is an Electron app which allows you to run Windows apps on Linux using a containerized approach. Windows runs as a VM inside a Docker container, we communicate with it using the WinBoat Guest Server to retrieve data we need from Windows. For compositing applications as native OS-level windows, we use FreeRDP together with Windows's RemoteApp protocol.
The docker container hosts QEMU and the docker files to run Windows. The author probably chose this method because the dockur/windows project basically automates and simplifies the whole process of installing and configuring QEMU, and installing and configuring Windows etc.
Banning them is a bit harsh and unrealistic, as they allow the platform to be monetized.
Here's my random idea: all commercial accounts must be labeled as such, and people should be able to opt-out from seeing any post by such accounts - except ads because, as I said, not allowing a platform to monetize is unrealistic.
(Edit: seems that the statement above applies to ChatControl 2.0, not the approved text. Apologies.)