abruzzi

Its funny, but I never watched broadcast TV or Cable primarily becuase "just watching whats on" meant a 99% chance of sitting through dreck that I can't stand, so I never did it. In 1995, I had a collection of over 200 VHS tapes of movies I loved (all purchased, not copied.) In 2005 I had a collection of 500 DVDs that I had purchased.

Today, I have about 700 movied ripped from DVDs (and the DVDs still in boxes somewhere), and 500 movies purchased on iTunes. I don't subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, or any other streaming service because, again, 99% of it is dreck I can't stand. So instead I have a collection of 1200 movies that I like and specifically chose and purchased. Some are better than others, but they're all ones I like.

Yeah, this one was hard to buy, unless there are a lot of billionaires that want to live in houses the size of a college dorm room. The cost to get to mars, and to live on Mars seems to me to be absolutely prohibitive at this point.

A number of the other observations also seemed to be a stretch. I'm not sure AI will have the level of impact he expects in less than 30 years. the death of the local store and getting any product delivered in an hour or less seems way too optimistic when you consider all the small rural towns in the US that can't even get decent broadband today.

It is a delicate balance maintaining the right number of sub fora. One of my favorite a decade ago (electro-music.com) is still there but is very very dead, I think because they have something like 100 sub forums, so you would need a 1000 daily posting users to make it seem active. On the other hand, you have forums (gearspace.com) which don't seem to have enough subs so the main forums (I mostly go for the Electronic music forum) which makes it seem a little too busy or chaotic.

I fequently see the comment that forums are dead, and there is no one on them, so i want to ask--what type of forum is your experience with? i.e. what is the topic or field the forum is dedicated to? I ask because the 5 or 6 forums I frequent are very active. I just checked the online stats for one of the bigger ones and it currently has 1288 registered members online with 1491 guests (out of a total registered members of 405,506.) That one is big, so it requires a lot of subforums to keep the information orderly, but there are smaller ones that are still active too. The smallest I frequent (on a very esoteric topic for most) currently has 103 members online with 896 guests. I can keep up with most of the posts on that one, but 2/3rds are on topic that don't interest me, so the forum layout makes it easy to stick to just what interests me.

The reason for my question, is I wonder--topic dictates audience, are some audiences more microblogging friendly and so have jumped ship from forums, where the topics I'm interested in are more old-guy friendly so us luddites stick to the forums we've been on since 1999?

to me this is huge. HN, Reddit, twitter all encourage (or enforce) strict limits on post size. This seems to encourage a conversational aproach to discussion, and discourage longer discourse. HN certainly does have long posts, and I appreciate that, especially when it comes from someone with real world experience in a field under discussion. But something about forums seems to give people permission to give more detailed responses. I've read magazine article length posts on topics such as palladium printing or ARP 2500 schematics that have been amazingly informative, and weren't even topic starter posts but rather detailed answers to simple questions asked by a less knowledgable forum member.

In the real world, I'd rather read a book than have a conversation, so this appeals to me.

as an amateur pianist, I've played pianos with and without ivory keys, and the feel of ivory is a bit better. I'm not sure why, but it seems like it doesn't get as slick from sweat as you play. Of course, piano keys are not the cause of current ivory demand to the best of my knowledge, and I'll happily take non-ivory keys.

Corner cases happen every day where I work. Specifically, we have an internal domain, and many users, rather than typing finance.pdq.xy.pg (made up domain) we like to type finance to go directly to the correct server. But we can't because 9 times out of 10 chrome/safari/edge interpret as a search. I either have to remember to put in a trailing slash, i.e. finance/ or type the FQDN. Thats the only reason I use firefox--I can separate search from urls.

The primary reason I got my license wasn't to talk--something I do very infrequently--but rather I was interested in the technlogy behind shared locations tracking, but without infrastructure requirements. (think all the phone apps that show the location of your friends or family, but without needing a cell provider or cloud server.) The tech is called APRS and usually works at 1200 baud on 2 meter radio, and runs on top of AX.25 packet radio. It grew up more or less at the same time as consumer GPS in the late 90's (though I think it was first specified in the late 80s.

The article delicately hits on one of the biggest things potentially holding amateur radio back in the US (can't speak to other locations)--specifically that there is a strong and vocal contingent in the AR community that is negative, dismissive, and sometimes downright rude to newcomers. My age is somewhere in the middle--younger than most hams I've met, and probably older tham most people here. Fortunately, locally, most of the hams I've met have been very friendly and helpful, but online there is a lot of venom.

Part of it is political--people frequently conflate two interests, say AR and politics, and assume everyone else has the same two conflated interested. While I don't like to discuss politics with people, I'm not interestedin going to a AR meeting or event, and having to spent the whole time hearing people discuss politics. Part is cultural--AR is like a clique where a lot of people who've been in it for 50 years are resistant to people with different uses joining. It was a very long time before people stopped looking down on "no-code" hams--i.e. people who took their licensing exam after the FCC removed the morse code test. I also remember reding an official article on one of the most popular ham forums (not a trash post, but a published article) trashing "maker fairs" because it made him think of "homemaker", and that demeaned what he did.

Again, locally, I've never encountered this kind of attitude, but it is common enough online that I simply don't interact with other hams online. Its not whats interesting to me anyway--I got into it to get offline (I travel in places in my state that are over 100 miles from a cell signal, so infrastructure-free location tracking is great.) But I can see those attitudes poisoning interest from people younger tham me who socialize online and will think that this is the hobby, and walk away because they don't want to be a part of it. I hope I'm wrong, and I hope there are better resources online than what I saw a few years ago when I looked.

This is interesting. I've always worked off the assumption that while english legal documents look like english they are actuallysomething a little special. These words get tested in court cases and opinions are written about them and what them mean. So, in this case my assumption (possibly incorrect) had been that each of those words had specific legal meaning, and perhaps a venn diagram would show 95% overlap of the sets, by using both words they get 100% overlap.

(Its also why lay people shouldn't write their own contracts, because a lawyer with contract experience won't use words that haven't been tested.)

I've actually known quite a few people that liked the society depiceted in the novel. I had one friend that felt that it was ideal because what was depicted was a less painful version of the mindless drudgery that most of the world spends their life in, and those that don't fit in are sent somewhere where they can be themselves (Falkland Islands) He saw it as a better version of the divisions already present in our society. (His opinions, not mine.)

I've found the novel to be a bit of a Rorschach blot since people read their whole view of current society, and their place in it into the novel. As has been pointed out, Huxley was an artist, so his interpretation of his novel is heavily guided by a creative personality, and for many creative people, individuality is one of the highest goods. Others read their own views into it, and interpret the novel very differently. My personal reading has some sympathies with Huxley's version, but it is not the same. I'm not a fan of the way society (both at the macro and micro level) is structured now (or in 1932), so there are aspects of BNW that appeal to me.

I moved from Safari to Firefox a year ago (never used Chrome as my primary browser.) The reason I moved may sound really really dated, but I discovered that I can configure Firefox with separate search and URL fields. I //HATE// that UI and wanted my separate boxes back.

I wish I could find a extension that removes all motion on a page (video, js animated stuff) but I suspect that would be too difficult to do. I do use a extension that removes all color, but it doesn't work terribly well, and some UIs on websites are too dependant on color as differentiators.

its interesting that there seem to be cables connecting locations on the North Alaska caost, but nowhere else. I would have thought those locations would be too remote for land based connections, unless there is fiber running from Prudhoe Bay along the oil pipeline south.

I'm surprised that the author doesn't see modern usage of coined names, maybe we read different things. It is very common in almost all of Pynchon's novels. Vonnegut used it often as well."Benny Profane", "Oedipa Maas", "Pierce Inverarity", "Malachi Constant", and half of the characters in Gravity's Rainbow: https://www.coursehero.com/lit/Gravitys-Rainbow/characters/

Also, prior to BFS, in the earlier beta builds of BeOS, the file system was much more database like, but it ended up having performance issues (IIRC), so in a later version, they replaced it with BFS.

The university I went to had an option for the required math course that all students had to take--there was one "self paced" version of the class you could select. You did eveything yourself, and took all the tests for the class at your own pace. You still had to take about 6 or so tests, but you could use it to "test out." I'm not great at math, but this was basic algebra. I took all 6 tests in a row in a single day, and passed the class.

Definitly a good question, given that pedal bikes exist in a grey area of traffic definitions in many areas, but I will say in my area (small urban area of 150k population) 95% of bike lanes are in areas without sidewalks, just dirt shoulders.

This is not unheard of in the US as well. When you go into deteriorated urban neighborhoods, one of the reasons for the many vacant homes is that the accumulated property taxes on a particular home are far more that the value of the home. If you sell the home, the taxes go with it, so a new owner would have to pay those accumulated back taxes. In my state, after three years of unpaid property taxes, the property can be auctioned, but that assumes there is someone who is willing to pay for it, and then there is a period where the original owner can refund the buyer and take possession of property again. That makes it a long and fraught process to buy one of these auctioned properties.

So instead, they negotiate with the property owner to have them donate the property in return for forgiveness of the back taxes. This happened with a number of neighborhoods in Philadelphia, when I lived there. After the city took possession of the property, they would then setup a neighborhood group to give or sell the properties to people or businesses that they thought would help "gentrify" the neighborhood. The people requesting properties would fill out an application detailing how they would use the property, and the neighborhood council would select "deserving" applications (I put that in scare quotes because the process would sometimes be corrupted by people favoring friends.) I knew someone on one of these councils, and considered applying for a home, but decided I wasn't that committed to living there, and a year later moved west.

thanks for that link. Thats what I expected.

This is fascuinating. Fortunately I live in a state with very low numbers, both absolute and per-100k, but I was curious about how infections had spread across the country, so I found this data at the CDC:

https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/stats/tables.html

The really strange thing is Massachusetts. In 2010 they had 36.3 confirmed cases per 100k residents--one of the higher rates in the country at that time, but in 2019 they had .1 confirmed cases per 100k, while neighboring states remained high. I have to assume this isn't real or is some kind of artifact (not confirming, just treating?), but I wonder if anyone has any insight into this?

yeah, this breaks one of my fundamental web expectations--things don't scroll left to right, scrolling is up and down. If it would translate my scroll wheel to into left right action, or if it was changed to stacking old pages at the top rather than on the left, it would work much better for me.

not an expert in optics, but I thought the limitation of curved sensors in achieving the hypothetical reduction in lens complexity is every focal length would require a different curve radius? So you'd have one focal length that would be significantly simplified because the curve of the sensor would match the curve of the focal "plane" and any other lens you attach would have to become equally or more complex to match its curve to the curve of the sensor? I know for cell phones this wouldn't be an issue, because they have a single fixed lens, but for all the cameras with interchangeable optics, does flat makes more sense?

EDIT: after a bit of thought, if I'm correct above this would also benefit optics in many industrial applications. My brain is usually rooted in cameras people take pictures with, but there are optics and sensors in a lot of other applications. And of course saying "just cell phone cameras" is funny because they are by far the most popular cameras in the world, just that I never use them so they are a bit of blind spot for me.

the history of photographic lens design starts with simple single element meniscus and bi-convex lenses. Those early lenses were awful at accurately focusing what was in front of it, and over the next 170 years or so, there were hundreds or even thousands of lens designs many of which were trying reduce or eliminate all the different types of aberrations. By the time the 70's hit and software was starting to replace manual ray tracing for lens design, we started getting very accurate lenses, but manufacturing was a limiting factor. Today that is much less of a limitation and you'll find lenses with 20 elements, aspherical elements, and tons of stuff lens designers from the 70's could only dream of.

By eliminating aberrations to the extent that they have, some people will call the new lenses "characterless". In some cases that may be an issue, but with modern digital cameras and photoshop, its probably better to start with an accurate lens, and tweak your look in software, something you'd have much less flexibility to do if you started you capture with, for instance, a petzval lens.

But there are some of those old designs where their imperfections, are to many people, beautiful. And for me, I shoot only film, and lately only large format film, so I need to capture the image the way I want to see it. Yes, in a darkroom I can burn and dodge, and use other tricks to change how the final print looks, but there is a lot of stuff I can't add back in, so for me, capturing images with those imperfections allows me to create interesting scenes and looks.

NOTE: I actually know very little on the technical side about optics and optical design, consider the above more of a historical thumbnail with opinion mixed in. I would love to find an "optical design for dummies" book, because its something I'd love to learn.

Just don't store your potassium ferricyanide for cyanotypes, too close to the sulphuric acid you use as a photgraphic bleach. They don't do too well together.

I find receiving compliments to be very uncomfortable, so I don't practice it. Instead of complementing, I thank people. So instead of saying something like "you did a great job at this" I say "thank you for doing this." For some reason that makes all the difference to me. Now, I'm sure most people don't have the weird compulsions I have, but its very hard to do for others what you wouldn't want done for you.

This sums up my thoughts perfectly. I would add a comment--all of the anti-apple voices in the article talk only about the poor business that will be hurt. The never talk about the benefit or drawback to the people being tracked. Their approach can be summed up as "we have a right to this data and telling people about our tracking and asking if it is alright with them is not alright." So businesses have rights but individuals don't.

Personally, I hope things like this start to kill off the "free internet." I'd much rather pay for the things that I use.

My insulin copay every three months is $100 ($50 for the Novolog fast acting, and $50 for the Tresiba slow acting insulin.) My insurance's portion is closer to $4000 for that 3 months, lst time I looked. Type I Diabetes is expensive, there was a period when I was unemployed and uninsured where I had to pay for type N and type R out of pocket, but the analogs like Novolog and Tresiba is so much easier to control. This is a very good thing.

Last week I camped for the entire week in a national forest and didn’t see another camper the entire time. The issue is we have high demand national parks that “everyone” visits and lots of national forest and BLM land that is very sparse.

My use of old computing technology is really in support of old music synthesizer technology. For instance my Yamaha VL1, one of the first and greatest waveguide physical modeling synthesizers, does not allow full editing of the model parameters from the keyboard itself. Yamaha made a few editors for it that use MIDI SYSEX to edit the models. Unfortunatley those only run on MacOS System 7. So I have to keep an ancient mac for that.

Many of my synths use 3.5" floppies. The ones that use FAT formatting can easily be used with a USB floppy on a modern computer, but the ones that have their own proprietary disk formats (most of them) require software with direct access to the floppy that can't be got through a USB connection. So, for those, I have an old Windows laptop with built-in floppy and software like Omniflop to manage those disks.

Probably one of the greatest things to make old tech more manageable (for me) is the SCSI2SD project, which makes an SD card into a SCAI device. Since SCSI was hugely popular with classic samplers (synths that can record audio and use the recorded audio as the sound source in the synth sound) I have a half dozen SCSI2SD drives so I don't have to keep ancient parallel SCSI dive alive.

This is really the opposite of what I always loved about Legos as a kid. All these complex kits seem more like jigsaw puzzles--only one way to go together. What I loved about Legos as a kid was making my own creations.

He does mention in the article that programming is different from some other fields in that it is not regulated: "Unlike other fields such as medicine and civil engineering, in most countries, software programming is not regulated." Medicin and Law definitely fall under the "regulated" category. I can definitely apply his point to science and math because just because you know one area of study very deeply, doen't mean you know much if anything about other areas under the same field.

EDIT: Just to add on the regulated point--it can mean that the varying paths to knowledge are narrower with less variation. You're not a lawyer unless you go through a pre-approved 3 year curriculum, and pass a standardized test (bar). This limits he "why didn't you know about this" complaints because most lawyers have had a very similar path to knowledge.