dicriseg

I don’t go there more than once a week anymore because there isn’t a good mobile app. I previously doomscrolled Reddit for a couple of hours each day. It’s been great for me!

Ah, a fellow frequent flyer, I see? I don't really have a horse in this race, but Microsoft turning Azure credits into Skymiles would really be something. I wonder if they can do that, or if the credits are just credits, which presumably can be used for something with an SLA. All that said, if Microsoft wants to screw with them, they sure can, and the last 30 years have proven they're pretty good at that.

That is an amazing story. And you know that because of you, that person probably still calls their browser “the internet” because you showed them how to get to google.

I can’t imagine any old person calling tech support now and getting that kind of help. But think about how many people got their very first exposure to the internet just before you hung up the phone. Crazy.

Click on start. Yeah that’s in the bottom left. Yup that one. Then look for settings. No the word settings. Has a little arrow next to it. Yeah hit that. It didn’t do anything? Wait, click with the mouse button on the left. Yeah it brought up a little menu to the right? That’s good. Now look for… ok let’s start over and remember not to click anywhere besides where I tell you to. And keep the mouse where it is. Ok find the start button again. No its in the bottom left of your screen…

This is unlocking memories for me. I think we used to tell folks something like "If it's under $50 and Walmart sells it, that's a winmodem" or something like that.

In theory, one of the selling points was that as standards changed, you would just upgrade your drivers/software and not buy a new modem. That probably made a lot of sense if you bought a USR Winmodem, but those $20 unbranded models were lucky to ever see an update. If you were lucky, you had a reference model and could use the OEM drivers which did occasionally get updated. But by the time these things came about, V.90/V.92 existed, and dialup standards were kind of frozen in that 56k-if-you-were-lucky state. There wasn't anything to upgrade to - you got DSL if you wanted more bandwidth over POTS lines, or you went to cable.

Also I could be completely full of shit on the above. These are memories from 16-18 year old me.

> Unsure if our go-external plan made sense or not (does an internal hardware modem run its own UART or communicate over ISA to the board's serial port?).

Internal hardware modems had their own UART. A lot of them had DIP switches or jumpers where you'd set the IRQ and COM port. You needed to set them to a free IRQ/COM pair.

This will take you back in time: https://support.usr.com/support/5685/5685-files/spvc336.pdf

There needs to be a special kind of therapist for people like us.

This was definitely when tech support could still be fun. We didn't have tiers or scripts or anything, just a handful of people on shift answering calls. You kind of loved when you got one like this when the customer calling in also had a good attitude about it. Probably because you knew the call was going to eat up at least a quarter of your shift, and you got to think a little. It sure beat the 10th time that day you were walking someone through uninstalling and reinstalling TCP/IP on Win95/98/ME.

All these years later I really do still have anxiety when the phone rings, though. I have an irrational fear of picking up even when it's, like, my dad, or picking up the phone and having to call a business to ask a question or something.

Do you happen to remember what sort of system you had that still had an 8250 but extended into the >14.4kbps era? Was this just a super old machine in the mid 1990's, or something in the 486+ range and the motherboard manufacturer had a lot of late 80's chip stock?

Yeah, in the case of winmodems/softmodems, it was because A is cheaper. Or, at least, you could externalize the costs.

In our case, we technically did not support your hardware - you had to show up with a working modem. But in practice, if you want to retain your customers, you need to support their hardware. At one point we used to have CDs full of known good drivers for all of the common softmodems that we'd send out if we couldn't figure out a configuration workaround. Even then, I had a handful of discussions with folks where I basically told them that their thing wasn't going to work - they either needed a different modem, of which we'd recommend a few that we knew some stores carried, or they needed to find a way to cut down their line noise. I'm one of those types that takes it a little bit personally when I spend a bunch of time on something and still can't solve it, so that always sucked. Maybe you could say that wasn't strictly the modem's fault, but even the cheapest hardware modems had better tolerance for line noise.

I was doing dialup internet support when these things hit the market. What a fucking mess. It’s 25 years later and I still get anxious when the phone rings, because my brain thinks it might be a senior citizen who can’t connect after they got a good deal on a new computer. Sometimes we could get them back on line with an init string, but often they needed new drivers. Walking someone through either of those over the phone was brutal.

Getting online as easily as we do today is nothing I will ever take for granted!

Was that what Breather tried to do?

I’m in my 40s so Google wasn’t my first search engine but it’s definitely been what I’ve used the most. And I do think it has changed similar how to you describe it. But I see the change more as:

You used to go to Google and effectively be asking, “Google, find me information about X.” Today you’re implicitly asking, “Google, show me ads related to X.” You just kind of accept that what it shows you will be the thing that is most fine tuned to appear most related to X - and the most common reason to do that fine tuning in the first place is to deliver an ad.

So you gotta search in natural language like an ad, and hope that someone in that first page of results decided to SEO some particularly good content so they could get you there to look at more ads.

The convention when flattening is exactly that I thought - an underscore per level of nesting. This is what I would expect to see too.

I built an app for myself that I’ve been considering rolling out as a product. It’s built around SMS because I will always look at a text message but app notifications are constant and easy to ignore. But the whole idea of the product is built around not being able to ignore the thing the app tracks for you. So far in a limited release the only thing I’ve learned is that my free tier needs to be quite limited and that it’s going to cost a few bucks per month per user to run it, so I need to charge more than that. But you’re effectively paying to be texted about something specific. It’s not because you don’t want to opt into push notifications - it’s because you’re literally paying for something to cut through the noise. Im not OP but if they’ve got something similar going on, that’s a good reason to use SMS.

That said your concern is incredibly valid and it’s why SMS needs to remain somewhat expensive. Could you imagine if SMS was as cheap as email? Holy shit the spam volume.

The headline immediately reminded me of the Juicero.

How can they advertise on-device if they’re immediately sending your data elsewhere?

> An airbnb for hotdesk coworking

WeWork was just ahead of their time!

How did they burn that much cash in a year?

No. But my AI will hang out on the Japanese internet for you.

That looks great but it needs to not cost $1300. Seems like their use case is conference rooms but I’d love for remote folks with their own whiteboards to have this.

I was going to post something similar and then saw yours, and it was better. We can add that math is language, and sometimes language describes things that are real, and sometimes not.

These statements are not mutually exclusive. Tech workers deserve higher salaries for the value they provide. And the market is to some extent manipulated, or we wouldn’t see massive layoffs and massive (and growing) profits. The difference is, tech workers don’t have an analog of layoffs at their disposal. Workers control labor supply of 1, when most companies individually control large multiples of the demand side. That doesn’t mean that workers deserve less.

I imagine there would be plenty of folks willing to come over if the wages at least got into the ballpark of the US. My impression is that the visa/residency process isn’t too onerous if you’re coming over with a job. Close the gap enough and it’s worth it for many, with quality of life stuff taking up the slack. But it can’t be too large, because tech workers can afford quality of life in the US too - it’s just purchased a la carte with the higher salary.

Completely disagree. Some folks are brilliant but aren’t going to function well in group settings all of the time. You still need to find a way to listen to what they have to say, and 1x1s accomplish that for many people. Otherwise, group dynamics can just bias toward the loudest or most outgoing.

Not to mention, you also get to just talk nonsense and get to know each other as humans a bit. Some folks enjoy that, me included.

Im surprised a seat comes standard in a Porsche.

My child is 11 and starting middle school next year (US). They walk to and from school. They have an iPad and a PC at home, with a lot of freedom, but I also have pretty solid DNS filtering for ads, malware, and some other junk. Social media isn’t allowed, and their email account is forwarded to us. iMessage is allowed contacts only but it’s just a matter of asking us. We want some oversight. But no phone - the iPad stays home, and they have an Apple Watch that lets us keep in contact, know where they are, but has no real distraction apps and no camera. We don’t really know when we’ll allow a smartphone but not soon.

> In my experience, Apple doesn't like any standards it doesn't control with an iron fist

Apple supports a number of open standards. I think I’d modify your statement to say Apple doesn’t want to depend on any standards it doesn’t control. And while that may appear nefarious, I get Apple’s implied position there. They have really tight coupling between hardware and software in order to deliver on the UX that they intend (whether or not you like all or some of it). If they’re designing their own software and hardware, I can see why they’d also want to implement standards that they can control to some degree - otherwise their UX is dependent on others. This is also why I think Apple sometimes implements new industry standards, USB-C being one example - if no one else has made an effort yet, they can influence the direction by being first movers.

See above if you're interested in that. It does work quite well, even with nested virtualization (WSL2).

I put up a draft PR to demo how to run it on a GPU: https://github.com/getumbrel/llama-gpt/pull/11

It breaks other things like model downloading, but once I got it to a working state for myself, I figured why not put it up there in case its useful. If I have time, I'll try to rework it a little bit with more parameters and less dockerfile repetition to fit the main project better.

The newer Rad bikes have hydraulic brakes - the older ones (like my City 3) had cable brakes with the integrated motor cutoff.

I upgraded to hydraulic brakes and wanted to keep the motor cutoff - it was hard to find levers with the integrated switch. I ended up with a kit using XOD brakes, which have the integrated cutoff and are otherwise just fine. I did, however, toss their included brake pads after a bit of riding and replaced them with Tektro P20.11 metal/ceramic pads, and those made a huge difference. That and bleeding the brakes properly.

What good is a product to a startup if no one's using it? Sales turns the product into money.