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evilbob93

70 karma · joined October 6, 2021

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evilbob93··on Learning another language may be one of the best ways to keep your brain healthy
I knew a German person who was a NLP practitioner who said that he didn't know how to be depressed in English
evilbob93··on Cherish your physical books and media
This sort of thing has been going on for some time. Disney's Fantasia has been excised for many years. They held off on having it available in any consumer format (aka VHS) and when it was, there was one scene in particular that had been drastically altered. In the centaur girls and centaur boys scene, one of the girls had, in the original, a servant that was an obvious racist trope, black face with bows. You can find stills of it here and there. In all of the versions I've found, they zoomed up on the pretty centaur's face.

Don't even get started with Song of the South.

evilbob93··on Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
haven't read the whole comment thread but wanted to mention this:

as an "aphant" (never knew that was a word) I get really vivid visuals on certain psychedelic drugs like psilocybin or DMT. Not so much acid, however.

evilbob93··on Finger: the 1971 social network that never died
Funny thing: today at work, I was curious. Windows utility? try a few of the handles in the article.

Couple hours later, i get pinged in Teams by someone in the security group who, who was flagged for my activity. No harm, but he said that they watched it because it had been used for malware. Said I shouldn't use it unless i had some business need, would need to do a request apparently.

evilbob93··on Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated
Piling on a moment to write to a real hero...

In the 1980s/1990s I was a VAX/VMS person and your book was a hit in our LUG because it included REAL DCL CODE.

I've frequently quoted your "if it isn't logged, it didn't happen".

Thank you.

evilbob93··on Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
I melt milk jugs and other HDPE plastics into musical claves and drum sticks as an answer to "recycling plastic is kind of bs". It melts at 350 degrees and can be done in a toaster oven in the garage or even the kitchen with proper ventilation. The smell isn't that bad, nothing like if you dropped plastic in a fire.

I've also made some sticks from braiding plastic grocery bags which are also often made of HDPE (#2) type plastic.

evilbob93··on Show HN: GovAuctions lets you browse government auctions at once
Tried again and it's showing my state. Thank you for looking.
evilbob93··on Show HN: GovAuctions lets you browse government auctions at once
I'm getting only Wisconsin no matter what state I choose. I have not created an account yet, would that make it actually work?
evilbob93··on Show HN: Home Maker: Declare Your Dev Tools in a Makefile
I like the idea, and I would like to use it. It still requres me to be conscious enough to add a new tool to it.

I'd love to see something like a "discover" option that attempts to scan what things I have added to assist me in building the make for the next time.

evilbob93··on Employees Are Taking Pay Cuts in Huge Numbers
It's worth mentioning here that a lot of people who HAVEN'T lost their jobs are taking pay cuts just because cost of living increases aren't always there. If you're a contractor, often the contract is just extended and doesn't take into account the macro issues we're all seeing.
evilbob93··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://rcanzlovar.com
evilbob93··on GNU Year 2000 List (1999)
I won't live long enough to care, but it seems like we are setting up for a Y2100 problem. The Y2k issue was understandable and justifiable - when a lot of the systems were built, the dominant carrier of data was an 80 column punch card or card image. Two digits was VERY expensive.

It seems we have fallen into the habit of doing 2 digit years again in a lot of cases and there isn't an architectural reason for it. Am I the only one seeing this?

evilbob93··on Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn?
reminds me that my first taste of the internet was the days where you pretty much had t have a university account. I used a friend's, and was blown away by what I found on Usenet
evilbob93··on Feds want to ban the Flipper Zero – Experts say it's a scapegoat
I got the black Kickstarter-only version. I got interested in coding in C again. My (now) ex broke up with me over this thing on the mistaken notion that I was messing with her somehow electronically. I got told i had to leave. Tonight. And take all my electronics with me. She cited having her "black hat friend" looking into it and he said it was pretty evil. I am sure she is reading the recent news with some level of satisfaction.

I bought another a couple months later and if I can get over my ADHD, I still hope to make the radio chat useful.

evilbob93··on Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)
Born in 1961 and these articles don't touch on one thing that I remember when I was a kid: you only needed 5 numbers to dial if you were calling someone else in the same thing. This was the case at my grandparents in Bay City, Michigan in the late 1960s. My cousin's number was LIncoln 2-9729

I have never understood how that worked despite my father working for the phone company. Dad explained a lot of things, but that wasn't one of them.

evilbob93··on USENET rises again?
It's arguable that today the "friction" might be a feature.
evilbob93··on USENET rises again?
a couple years after AOL came online and... well changed it quite a bit.
evilbob93··on Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)
Hey what if we sent ai bots to talk to each other on Usenet?
evilbob93··on Ask HN: What did you recently learn you've been doing wrong your whole life?
I also came to the same realization about the same age a few years ago.

There is an article making the rounds that refers to a mathematical proof of shoelace tying last couple weeks that talks about this (https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/math-tie-shoes-corre...)

I tried the Ian way once, but didn't like it, but once i figured out that i was grannying my shoes all my life and fixed it, I don't have to tie the loops together like i did all my life.

evilbob93··on Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Collected K-Mart background music tapes
I have one of these stuck on my phone that I listen to occasionally and I giggle a lot when they mention their lifestyle consultant Martha Stewart.
evilbob93··on Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Collected K-Mart background music tapes
Example of this is that one of these recordings, listed as "Kmart 1973 Reel To Reel" has an address of 3020 East Grand Blvd in Detroit. Motown's original studio was on West Grand Blvd. It's intriguing to consider who the voice talent was, and what if any crossover there was during those days.

Googling the address shows that the former recording studio is now a residence.

evilbob93··on Does your office have a library?
I worked for Oracle in their Broomfield, Colorado campus. There was an alcove off a hallway that had bookshelves and a library that had been apparently inherited from StorageTek, an acquisition of Sun Microsystems before Sun was in turn bought by Oracle. It was a fascinating snapshot of mid-90s (mostly) tech books, but there were some interesting cultural books including African American studies. Basic HTML books, several O'Reilly books with the bear postcard in them still (I stole one =) ) but the best one for me was a book about OpenVMS Digital Command Language, on which I cut my teeth in the 1980s. It was a favorite place for me to spend a few minutes after lunch in the cafeteria on my way back to my desk.

I currently work for Western Digital and recently someone put a bunch of tech books out on a credenza in one of the collaboration areas with a note inviting people to borrow them. Not exactly a library, but it reminded me of the nostalgia people are expressing here about the big batches of books we used to lug around from cubicle to cubicle (often using an office chair).

evilbob93··on Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
same with New York Times... and Wall Street Journal... and Financial Times... and The Economist... and many others. I've wondered what it would take to pre-emptively edit HN so i don't even see those links.
evilbob93··on Ask HN: How do we unionize tech?
"tech work" is more than just programmers. Highly paid programmers might not be the initial target market, but roles like front line tech support, quality assurance roles would benefit from collectively pushing back on management initiatives like surveillance etc. Many times these jobs are deeply ingrained in a bespoke system that doesn't necessarily translate to another position.

When I worked at a UAW shop (GM) in the 1980s, there were salaried engineers and union hourly people building the cars. When the union made a gain by way of a strike, it was automatically applied to the salaried folks. We understood that their work benefitted the rest. This started to break down when GM bought EDS in 1985 and transferred all their IT people over to it and they lost all of those benefits. People who were able to get themselves classed as "engineers" rather than data processing were able to avoid the big transfer.

evilbob93··on Ask HN: How to Prepare for the AI Apocalypse?
a lot of the skills that one needs for a job that we're arguing is beyond the AIs, like software architect or writing anything with real thought in it, implies that we humans are smarter and we can just do the more interesting writing. How does one become a good writer? By writing a lot of stuff at a lower level. I am concerned that by putting all of the grunt work on the AIs will remove the training opportunities that the humans need to actually do the higher level stuff. Removing a few rungs at the bottom of the ladder of becoming better at your career.

I became concerned at this after reading an article a while back that talked about how some sports writing has been automated for years (how hard is it to write that this team won, the other lost and the score was blah) but that work was needed for writers to get to the next level.

A similar thing could be said about technical support folks. The AI can handle the easy ones, but without the easy ones, how do we bring up a new tech to level 2 if level 1 doesnt exist any more? Also, there are a lot more level 1 techs than level 2.

evilbob93··on Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?
Tying my shoes: My knots would always come out, so i got into the habit of tying the loops together. A few years ago, in my mid 50's I realized that I was tying a granny not rather than a square not. I made the adjustment and have never tied my loops together again.
evilbob93··on Tell HN: Vim users, `:x` is like `:wq` but writes only when changes are made
I think i was 40 years into my usage of vi when i learned that ZQ was a thing. I bet someone else learns it right here.
evilbob93··on The Prisoner
followed, perhaps, by Benny Hill.
evilbob93··on Ask HN: Who Remembers “Abort. Retry. Fail?”
laser holes.
evilbob93··on Ask HN: Does ChatGPT scare you? It scares me
So far I am skeptical. It can do some things, but it is not beyond bullshitting.
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