I get the name, but for a moment I thought someone had made a RPG IV or similar interpreter/compiler in Rust..

And potentially get fired for using unauthorised software on a corporate machine. Or find out tha USB storage is disabled (which is better than getting fired).

That is horribly Draconian. You need to find a better place to work.

"Unauthorized software" is a thing where you work? OMFG.

Physical letters do not obviate scams, nor is the cost that prohibitive. I remember actual 419 scams on blue airmail all-in-one letters back in the 80s. And that was international post too.

Think of it like changing your SSH port. It does nothing to prevent scams per se but you'll have to deal with only 0.00001% of them.

If you build an analogy based on what I get in my mailbox it's more like publishing your email on the internet.

They don't remove it but they do reduce it.

I have an inbox, and I do not receive a lot of scam post. In fact, I don't think I received any since I lived at this address (~10 years ). We do get a few promotional leaflets every other week.

OTOH, I get hundred of spam emails every day.

The former is something which I can handle manually easily, the other is not.

It doesn't have to prevent the scam completely, it just has to make harder for them to scam you than it would be to move on to scam someone else.

If you are targetting a list of well-known authors I guess outsourcing the writing of a couple of hundred handwritten letters shouldn't be too hard. I'm sure they they can find a school class in Nigeria or Kenya who would gladly do it for a few dollars — or a struggling teacher willing to get creative with the homework assignments.

12‽ I'd swear the Slackware I downloaded was closer to 30+. On dialup. Via a VAX. Using FTP to go from internet to the VAX box, then Kermit from the VAX to the DOS PC using Procomm Plus. Write it all, start the install sequence, find out that the 18th disk was bad. Reboot. Rinse. Repeat.

X disks were X11. There were also the A,B, C etc disks.

Then there was the Coherent install, with massive manual on ultra thin paper with the shell on the front.

UnRaid does a variant of this; license is tied to the serial of the USB drive. It barely writes to the drive, so wear isn't meant to be much of an issue.

Tangential to this was the existence of California Software Product's "Baby/36" software. My father was a 36/400 programmer and sysadmin, and in his spare time used Baby/36 to write software for local businesses. I have vague memories of parallel port dongles being involved back then too. Don't think he mandated their use, was more a "framework" requirement.

For me, in Ireland, tacking "-ai" on the end of Google searches disables the hallucination engine. For now at least.

I poked this - the 96 installer from Archive didn't play nice with wine. However, dosbox plus win3.11 and some ingmount commands worked just fine. So yes, you could export to plain text or similar.

Someone's first impressions on the new version from Commodore International.

On the note of Jupyter notebooks and version control - there was a talk at this year's Pycon Ireland about using a built in cleaner for notebooks when committing the JSON (discard the cell results), and then dropping the whole lot into a CI system utilising remote execution (and Bazel or similar) to run and cache the outputs. Was a talk from CodeThink. No video up yet though. Scenario was reproducible notebooks for processing data from a system under test.

> On the note of Jupyter notebooks and version control - there was a talk at this year's Pycon Ireland about using a built in cleaner for notebooks when committing the JSON (discard the cell results)

Yup, I use a long "jq" command [0] as a Git clean filter for my Jupyter notebooks, and it works really well. I use a similar program [1] for Mathematica notebooks, and it also works really well.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/74104693

[1]: https://github.com/JP-Ellis/mathematica-notebook-filter