angst_ridden

Not T̶w̶i̶t̶t̶e̶r̶. Not X. Tik-tok maybe?

Not to be confused with NightOwlConnect, which allows one to remotely access NightOwl-brand security camera DVRs.

I'd not be surprised to find that that app has some sketchiness baked into it as well.

We used fake food all the time in product photography.

I could tell you stories about motor oil (to simulate syrup), lucite ice, agar or glycerine "dew drops" or the shine of "fat" on grilled meats, shaving cream (to simulate whipped cream), acrylic soups, and so on.

I could also tell the story of when an intern accidentally overdid the CO2 (to "reactivate" a drink), and sprayed a big glass of warm, flat cola onto a $40k Linhof 4x5 camera/lens. Yeah, that intern was me on my first day.

My English teachers always taught Kafka largely on the depressing negativity of his writing. Yet he’d hold salons to read his work to friends, and they’d all roar with laughter (Kafka too). Absurdism can also be cathartic humor.

Spoken like someone who has never worked retail.

When it comes to Apple Maps versus Waze, Apple Maps tend to be more realistic about arrival times, too.

I had a 1973 2.0 for much of the 90s. It was definitely the most fun car I've owned. I foolishly let it go and "upgraded" to a Boxster, which may have been faster and more comfortable (stuff like A/C was a cool innovation for me then), but was a lot less fun.

The 914 cornered like it had talons with which to grip the road. You could be going up curvy roads like Las Flores Canyon in Malibu, cornering at a speed where any other car would let go, crank the wheel over, and the 914 would just happily go exactly where you pointed it.

It wasn't nearly as fast as the Boxster that replaced it, but it felt faster. That rattling acceleration off the line, especially being so low to the ground, that smell of hot oil, the sound of the engine right behind you ... I miss that car.

Yeah, it was in the shop a lot. So was the Boxster. The difference was, of course, that you'd buy your replacement parts from the VW parts catalog rather than the Porsche parts catalog and save yourself 600-800%. I still remember getting a replacement VW window crank for $2 when the Porsche dealer quoted me $75.

I got old and "responsible." I eventually ditched the Boxster for a reliable, truck-like Subaru. And I now live in a city where transit and bike infrastructure is great - I don't even own a car. I don't miss it much. But there's one day a year, when the weather reminds me of that first springtime ride up Angeles Crest Highway in the 914 with the top down, and then I'll admit to some small regret.

The difficulty is in the "what actually happened" when the only documentation is from hundreds of years after-the-fact.

The gear from SCW can be used without any internet connection at all. https://getscw.com

I am not affiliated with them, other than that I've bought equipment from them in the past.

Back in the day, I worked at a print shop as a press operator for AB-Dick 360CD printing presses.

We'd clean the ink off the rollers between separations with benzene. We didn't have any special ventilation (or even use gloves, for that matter). The first few times you did it, you'd get quite a headrush.

It's 40 years on, now, and I haven't yet experienced any health effects that I can directly link to that exposure. I'm sure I'm dumber than I would have been had I avoided the exposure, although I also grew up in the era of leaded gasoline. Based on what I've read, I'm more likely to experience Parkinson's, anemia, and various cancers in the future.

It did indeed!

Also, Voyage of the Valkyrie... That was a hell of a game, and wasted many, many hours of my life.

I too have made "bow-coupe" such errors.

I think Diamond's greatest fault as a researcher is his reliance on reductivism. Anyone can cherry-pick history to support "5 simple rules that explain X" if the rules are even reasonably sane.

It may be satisfying and entertaining to read, but human history is much more complex than just a few rules.

I always found McNeill's "Plagues and Peoples" a much better read than Diamond's book on semi-overlapping topics.

It wasn't his hating on the victim that got him fired. It was his stating that the raging mob was not behaving appropriately for his race-based expectations of them.

Back when I was learning to wire up a Z-80 to make my own first primitive 4kb RAM computer, I really didn't think I'd live to see the day when there were 32-bit CPUs with 32kb RAM in lightbulbs.

In the early 80s, my dad bought a Heathkit oscilloscope, and we assembled it together.

My father's in his 90s now, and I think he still uses that scope!

I run a site for a large corporate client. People can sign up to get a quote from a regional dealer for a specific type of complex product. To get a quote, they have to fill out several forms, and select detailed specification, etc, and choose email as the way to deliver the quote.

We regularly have users flag the email they receive from this process as spam.

I have personally called to follow up in some cases to understand if our service was being abused or what the issue was. It was eye-opening. One user said "oh, yeah, I wanted that when I filled out the form but not when I got the email." Several marked the proposal as spam because they didn't like the final quote that was put together from their requirements.

Several said things like "I get too much email" and when pressed as to why they checked the box that said they wanted their quote delivered as an email replied that they didn't know, or they changed their minds, or they didn't want HTML email, or they didn't want a plain-text email, or their name was not in the subject line of the email, or that their company name was not in the subject line of the email.

This is a very low volume, very expensive, highly technical product. We're talking maybe a dozen requests per day nationwide. So those people flagging the emails as spam have a significant impact on the overall deliverability to services like GMail.

yes, but the difference between having your biological processes disrupted and being smashed with a rock are pretty significant, and the evolutionary responses are quite different.

Yup. They have an FAQ on the subject, and claim it's a Ventura bug and not one of theirs.

I've filed a bug report with Apple, for all the good that will do.

What's weird, annoying, and frustrating is that it will work correctly for the first day or two after a reboot, then start exhibiting the bad behavior. Once the "wrong desktop" popups start, they continue until the next reboot.

People are expendable. There's a new crop every year. Corporate profits, on the other hand ...

Same here. Maybe it's happening by region?

When I bought a place in the LA area, the house had neatly trimmed lawns and flowers planted with perfect spacing around the borders in both the front and back yards.

Over the past twenty years, it's been converted into a wild, exuberant mix of flowers, fruit trees, and native plants. We do irrigate with drip-lines. We have a lot of butterfly host plants, and it is now a veritable Disney-film-happy-place filled with birds and bees and butterflies (and aphids and spiders and salamanders).

There are a few chairs and benches scattered around, and I sit outside and read or code on pleasant days. I spend a lot of time taking macro photos of bugs and flowers.

Several of our neighbors loathe us, saying that our yard is a mess and lowers property values. Their pesticide-ridden lawns are perfectly green, even in the Summer, and they are only ever outside to instruct their gardeners where to direct the leaf blowers.

Most people walking by are enchanted by the wildness and the animal life. Kids, particularly, are thrilled when they see the butterflies, or get to pick cherry-tomatoes or berries off the vines.

Yeah, well, being very old myself, stuff like Mosaic / Navigator / NetExplorer / SpyGlass still all seem sorta recent to me.

Well, the solution to search / archive.

I could argue that those are two very different functions. I could also argue that with a new architecture, Thunderbird could satisfy both functions well. It just doesn't now.

I've found that keeping all my old mail--including from old dead accounts--in Thunderbird has been a big part of the performance problems I experienced. Having been using Thunderbird from the very earliest of days (after migrating from SeaMonkey), I had a lot of dreck from old POP accounts and newer IMAP accounts.

I've switched to having it do full downloads of messages from IMAP, and run MailBackupX separately to ingest everything. Every month or so, I delete everything older than a month from Thunderbird, and rely on MailBackupX for my historical mail reference, searches, etc.

Now Thunderbird is fast and responsive.

My partner keeps hundreds of thousands of emails in Thunderbird from tens of email accounts, some active, some dead. Last time I looked, it was well over a terabyte of old email. The computer, a reasonably recent and fast Mac, can take several hours to start Thunderbird. That being said, I'm impressed it can handle that much cruft at all.

ChatGPT sometimes reminds me of a junior programmer.

I asked for a code example of clipping a polygonal shape with another polygonal shape, and it wrote code that just deleted vertices from the subject polygon that were outside the clipping polygon.

Interestingly, the correctness of the code it generated depended on which language I asked for it to generate the code in. I assume that says something about the corpus of code it analyzed and the relative quality between the languages.

Yeah, the "snag this roll of film with a plane as it parachutes down" is the kind of thing that elicits a "wait .. what!?" reaction.

But then, so does the quality of the images they captured relative to what would be expected given the times.

I did work on the Inertia Upper Stage (IUS) project. That was the booster that would take satellites from the shuttle bay into their final orbits.

A lot of the IUS specifications were classified because of the payloads that were intended. Even the name of the program that made those specifications and the name of the organization that was behind the program were classified.

Of course, that all kind of fell apart when _Deep Black_ was published, and a lot of code names (the uttering of which were absolutely verboten) were suddenly being bandied about on the evening news.

I was in the weird position of pretending to not know code names that were being discussed on broadcast TV.

I was sued back in the Palm Pilot days for writing a game that involved moving blocks. The company that owned Palm Pilot rights to Tetris® claimed I was violating their trademark, which was clearly frivolous and incorrect. But I was just a dumb guy who had coded an original game, and they were a company with lawyers on retainer.

It doesn't matter what the law says or what is "right." It comes down to who has the power and who doesn't.

(The other difference between what humans do and what AIs do is a matter of scale. A human imitates by spending many hours to duplicate a work of art. An AI can churn out millions in a second. That's a separate issue, though.)