dhosek

There was an interesting recent 99% invisible episode about the creation of videos for Karaoke in the 90s, which talked about videos created on very low budgets for songs with tight constraints. Even adjusting for inflation, their budgets would be well below a million dollars by today’s standards (and some costs would likely be lower thanks to digital video removing the cost of purchasing and processing film stock and making editing cheaper).

This is where English’s defective subjunctive makes life harder: The point wasn’t about the practicality of the probe from a scientific position, but rather pointing out that even in a best-case scientific scenario, the political-economic-cultural forces are against us.

“It’s a Unix system. I know this.” was definitely the line from the movie most quoted in online spaces in the 90s.

Isn’t this a Windows flaw where it effectively treats the current directory as the head of the path? (I remember the naïve olden days of people’s Unix Path starting with .) Or is Cursor going out of its way to execute a git.exe in the current directory?

In California at the high school level, I think it’s only 1 or 2 years of PE.

Illinois still requires cursive as part of their elementary education curriculum (although it’s an outlier in that it also requires PE in every year of K-12 education and also for public university degrees¹ (maybe also private?) as well as speech in both high school and again for a public university degree.

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1. Typically this would only apply or a bachelor’s and maybe associate’s degree, but when I got my teaching credential/MS, because I had an out of state private college BA, I had to take undergraduate courses for state requirements including US Government, Biology, Speech and 2 PE classes. An ancient AP test score spared me having to take US History.

The rest of my 6-person team (ranging in age from 20s to late 50s maybe early 60s) has been very reluctant to embrace AI despite the push from our manager to do so. I was very much on their side initially, but creating a few little tools to ease some of my burdens sold me on the possibilities. It does feel like cheating and I have to admit that for one of the tools I built,¹ I haven’t even looked at the code, but rather did a few rounds of back and forth with Claude to make the thing do what I needed and to address bugs that showed up as a result of putting it through some real-world usage.

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1. A Mac menu-bar app to make it easier to know when I need to either do a PR or look at someone’s feedback on my own PR. Clicking the icon shows a list of all open PRs that I’ve created or that my review has been requested on (and clicking an item there will open the PR so I can act on it). If there’s a PR that I’ve not left comments on or approved, or if there are unreplied/unclosed comments on my PR or it’s been approved, a badge is added to the menu bar icon.

OK, so people are ordering a custom PCB from China for a one-off? Whatever happened to making them at home? I remember my brothers doing this in the bathroom sink with a board coated with copper¹, some special markers to draw the circuit on the board and chemicals to wash off the extra copper. I’m guessing they might have used our dad’s electric drill to put some holes in the board as well, but looking at the article, this doesn’t seem like an order from China need.

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1. Some details may be incorrect as I was 10, this was the late 70s and I only saw the results, not the process.

Having started using Claude Code at work, I think coding as we now know it will probably no longer be a career path in 5 years at the outside.

I’m old. If I had to, I could retire tomorrow, albeit on a restricted budget. But I worry about the younger folks (like my 25-year-old nephew) who haven’t built up the resources to survive without working who are in the field right now. There’s going to be a mega disruption and writing code is going to go the way of calculating square roots by hand or hot metal typesetting. There will still people doing it, but it will very much be a niche endeavor.

You could trust it to be probably correct but he wouldn’t have tried compiling it.

The phone cluster was especially amusing to see in the context of visiting a small history museum in Ohio earlier today with my kids (12 years old) and explaining to them about how a rotary dial phone worked.

(The added bonus comes from watching Monsters and Minions with them yesterday and during a scene where the director is informed that they ran out of film, my daughter turned to me and asked, “What’s film?”)

This is true, but even in print, properly typeset, mixed LR/RL texts can end up having ambiguities thanks to line breaks.

The millions of people who write in RL languages would like a word…

Mixing R-L and L-R scripts (as has been discussed here on many occasions) is a ripe arena for mysterious behavior. Given that even monolingual texts in R-L scripts will often include L-R characters, it can get hairy quickly. A desire to try to avoid having visible markers in text around the transitions is partly why the Unicode spec around bidi text is so complicated.

But who exactly will he be helping?

What I’m impressed by of late is that a lot of contemporary horror films (thinking of Weapons, Backrooms, Obsession) rely much more on a creepy mood than on gore to do their thing (which is not to say that they lack gore, but they don’t rely on it to the extent that horror films of the ’80s through '10s did (the Saw films probably being the apex of the splattercore aesthetic).

The Linux on the desktop one was the biggest “hell, yeah” moment for me. 99% of the desktop preference is familiarity. Since my personal computing has been on a Mac exclusively for the last 24 years and I’ve not used Windows for work more recently than 2018 (and it was sporadically the case in the decade before that), when I do use Windows, it feels like I’m typing in molasses. A Linux desktop feels like I’m typing in molasses with casts on both hands. That the desktop varies depending on the distro and whoever decided on the defaults makes it that much worse.

Meanwhile, I largely use a vanilla setup in MacOS. The only changes in the UI I make beyond the default are installing rectangle and flycut, switching the default keyboard to ABC-Extended and turning off caps lock. Everything else runs with default settings and I’m happier for it, especially when I need to do something on someone else’s machine. Losing those minor customizations doesn’t make the machine unusable or introduce too much friction.

“memorizing obtuse key commands which you never use on a regular basis” is exactly why I prefer Emacs over vi(m). The default configuration on Emacs works like most other contexts—I can just use the arrow keys to position a cursor and type.

And then, at least on the Mac, some of the basic commands in Emacs carry over not just to the terminal, but to things like text input windows in Safari and other Mac-assed apps so I can almost always use ctrl-a to go the beginning of a line, ctrl-e to go to the end, ctrl-k to delete to the end of the line and sometimes also I get esc-del to delete the previous line although that works in terminal, but not a Safari input window (and escape gets captured in IntelliJ’s terminal which kind of stinks).

I do feel that common config across a team is always a good thing. I’ve been the only IntelliJ guy on an Eclipse team and the only Eclipse guy on an IntelliJ team and both cases were worse than conforming to the convention.

That photo ws in the main article as well.

It was below when I left the comment.

I was looking at the controller support and apparently there are game controllers designed to follow the layout of a train operations controller with the same two levers that you can see in game.

No eye patch, peg leg or parrot, not a pirate.

Costco is also an anti-Amazon in that they treat their workers and their suppliers well.

Or taking a walk. There’s an intersection two blocks from me where a pedestrian was killed in a hit and run accident shortly after I moved to town. The roadside memorial remained in place for nearly two years (I remember thinking that the people who lived in the house at the corner where the memorial was would probably like to remove it, but didn’t want to appear callous).

The worst part is that even though the intersection has been a 4-way stop for over a decade (the additional stop signs added after the hit and run), I’ve twice nearly been struck by drivers blowing the stop sign after I’ve entered the intersection as a pedestrian.

Back in the 90s, I went to see an IMAX film about climbing Everest and at the beginning, I was thinking, “I could do this,” but as it continued my view turned into, “I will never do this. This is insane.”

What’s really scary now is that it’s turned into something where people have to literally stand in line to reach the summit.

When I first started using CarPlay, the screen that has the music and map showing simultaneously was not obvious and it wasn’t until well into my third long trip with CarPlay that I finally discovered it. I had thought the only display options were app full screen and app list. I think there was a change sometime in the last 3 years that made that the default starting display (or maybe I’m just a little less dumb now).

Right now it’s only dropped in GM’s EVs. Of course when this causes a drop in EV sales, they’ll use that as an excuse to kill off their EV lines.

Same with Toyota (fun fact—I discovered earlier this year, over three years that I bought my Prius, that there were whole displays in the dashboard I didn’t know existed while trying to adjust the volume from the steering wheel while I was backing out of my garage, but because the wheel was rotated 180°, I hit the wrong button. Turns out the navigation between different info displays is 2-dimensional and the ↑/↓ gives additional views into some of the information that I had no idea existed, as well as revealing some functionality I didn’t know was there for the HVAC).

From everything I’ve read about BYD, I’m thinking it’s almost certainly going to be the car I buy after my move to Mexico.

I think some of it is just aligning with more modern computing technologies combined with the people who write the materials have lived rapid evolution of computing technology and decided it was best to use a generic abstraction that better reflects contemporary technology. I’d note that Knuth, in The Art of Computer Programming moved his abstract machine from MIX to MMIX, the latter being a RISC instruction set, the former being more aligned with 60s style machine instructions.