hi-v-rocknroll

It's all because of those add-in cards containing engineering software. ;)

In other news, I have the HP 48GX overhead projector accessory I should dust off and recondition. Also have the thermal printer.

This reminds me of Shahzad "Raja" Chaudhry, the Texas political candidate who dumped a bunch of waste on some land he owned causing water and soil pollution impacting his neighbors and claimed agriculture tax breaks dishonestly.

https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/fort-worth-illegal-dump-c...

No. Did you even look? Modifying sources without releasing the changes. Sources maybe "released" to a degree, but it's more like malicious compliance not in the spirit of FLOSS.

Here's a reconstructed diff: https://github.com/skull-squadron/centos-9-stream-kernel-pat...

I had one of those in middle school c. 1990. It had function and program support. The problem with modifying one of those would be it's physically small and lacks I/O.

Upgraded to an HP 48GX sophomore year of high school. It worked well for math and physics coursework, AP Calculus BC, and the SAT-I math section. The IR serial port's LED was so powerful, there was a learning TV remote app that could control TVs from ~60-100' (20-30m) away. The ability to beam software to other calculators was just shy of the invention of the app store.

It's a shame it doesn't use Giac. RPN CAS forever! ;)

My HP 48GX screams in RPN nerd rage and jealousy.

While evil, it's common corporate practice (in the US) to get rid of new mothers and employees with deteriorating health, largely by looking for or fabricating trivial excuses to justify their termination. Corporate HR departments excel at finding legal excuses to dodge liability.

Mozilla isn't an open source project. Firefox, Thunderbird, and Bugzilla are moz projects.

I like the ideas of Dune and Nu, which I think were trailblazed by powershell to a degree. The problems of pure *NIX pipe philosophy with text as the lingua franca were persistent parsing problems and escaping. However, the problems of going to far in the way powershell went was it was too radical having to reimagine/replace/relearn almost everything, and generally more difficult to accomplish simple text manipulation. Nu at least maintains most of the *NIX shell UX. Maybe at some point in the future, we will reach parity to where there will fusion of the main DSLs, shells, and programming languages into a runtime interaction system that is somewhere between psql, Erlang shell, nu, and Squeak where there is programming language-OS parity obliterating the distinctions between programming languages, command shells, and DBMS shells. One can dream of a future where perhaps it will be possible to write a function, library, or program in any language one chooses and call it from any other shell or language without swig or ceremony.

Please upload to WinWorldPc and/or iarchive. ;B

The updated NetWare NFS Gateway 1.2C apparently came on a single floppy.

Chicago onwards was glorified Windows 3.0 386 enhanced mode, Cougar. The fundamental problems Win 9x has is it was buggier and didn't have the isolation assurances NT had. The main things Win 9x solved were the resource leaks of Win 3x and gradually increased relative stability. Whistler/Asteroid were the ways forward based on NT. (Pour one out for Neptune/Odyssey.)

Windows 2000 ("NT 5") was the most usable of that era (just a bit later). It was stable, solid, and had a responsive UI.

It's especially stupid to work extremely hard without gaining equity and profit sharing where they can just fire you for any reason. Employee-owned consultancies would make a lot more sense for the worker.

There's a fraction of Big 4/MBB associates who dream of becoming partners and this is the hazing ritual the culture has established to select who will get to stop 3-4-5 / 80 hr work weeks and pivot into something a little less insane with more money. The problem is: there aren't that many positions for project leaders through director compared to the number of associates. They'd probably be better off winning the lottery or going to work for one of their clients so they can have a life now rather than the nebulous promise of one at some point in the future.

In my experience, "table stakes" is bizword signaling used by demanding, ahole managers use to insist on severe work-life imbalance while simultaneously waxing about work-life balance and the mission statement, making them either intentionally dishonest or willfully cognitively dissonant.

Tech blogger hype has a history of cargo culting nonsense. This is nothing new. I think they killed AR by hyping GGlass as an artifact only for special people, while VR was handed a half-measured fate tempered by gaming (it's still impractical and rears its ugly head every 10 years compared to the potential utility of AR).

Centralized blockchain ledgers for immutable data storage is immensely useful to detect silent corruption or malicious data tampering for specialized use-cases (backup & restoration with air-gapped storage processes are required to assure high-confidence data integrity to correct such data problems).

GPU, server systems, and network access are so damn cheap and impressive with incremental advances that the killer apps challenges now are sanely management, planning, and cross-cutting concerns like emulation, resource allocation, configuration management, monitoring, security, and effective discovery and implementation of appropriate and benchmarked solution(s).

The application of LLMs yet aren't to the point of complete silicon & PCB design, application development, or systems management assuring a level of correctness using iterative feedback, but probably will approach something useful over time. Perhaps in 50 years, all living humans will lack the understanding of what software will have "eaten" in certain areas if engineers allow it and corporations optimize for it.

Manufacturers for certain categories of products are homogenized, often regionally, whereas the brands maybe many.

Plus, clandestine supply chain attacks fall into 2 categories:

- A. With manufacturer/reseller complicity. (Not many manufacturers choose this because it would harm their business.)

- B. Without manufacturer/reseller complicity, but with logistics interception for sw/hw implants or complete substitution. (This is the method NSA TAO used to load implants into Cisco gear.)

To prepare for lawsuits from families of the injured in what appears to be a supply chain attack maybe without the knowledge of their licensee in Budapest (BAC Consulting), and likely without their (Gold Apollo) knowledge. Deny and distance.

B players with too much ego are the kinds who put PhD on their card/throw titles around, talk about MENSA, and challenge everyone else to trivia contests. At a big name, exclusive department, more than half of the people were normal and well-adjusted, while the other half skewed on a continuum of quirky to mildly obnoxious or ego now and then but not completely intolerable. TED speakers and people with giant awards, prizes, and h-index. The worst types are the completely intolerable folks who are overconfident and treat others badly because of a superiority complex... the "big fish, tiny pond"-"Comic Book Guy" lifers are found in megacorps.

Another aspect to keep in mind is the ambiguity and conflation between a continuum of intentional (jerk) to unintentional (dork) lack of honest and accurate looking-glass self.

Finally, another anti-pattern of some subject matter experts is being too comfortable within a narrow range of subjects, talents, life experiences, etc. and being generally excessively risk adverse.

The best thing one can do is broaden their horizons by finding where the artists, (sane) homeless people, OG's, and otherwise interesting and genuinely awesome people hang out. Makerspaces, hidden cafe or bar, or so on. I met way more interesting quasi-homeless people in Palo Alto than former Apple employee #4 jerk friend-of-a-friend swinging their Lambo keys around. Ego is boring, status is boring, and absurd wealth is boring too.

Tenuous side-hustles don't get grown and built in a crisis to make a living.

It's far better to have a stable 9-5 gig and then build things on the side intending to grow them, or at least let them validate/bake with other income and/or savings to see where they go.

Palantir explicitly enables sketchy corporations and unfriendly regimes in doing mildly annoying to very bad things.

Integrity doesn't vary based on the actions of other people.

A better move would be to use the networking opportunity to find other high-performance people who don't like the BS, and form a productish-consultingish worker-owned co-op to replace the soulless, erratic corporation with a more stable, humane environment.

I wonder if anyone remembers the bad old says of System V init scripts without process supervision and with sequential runlevel-based startup and shutdown. Database server crashed (and didn't restart), and now you're looking for a log entry or cron email to troubleshoot what went wrong and having to manually restart it like an animal.

I pray that, in the future, *nix/POSIX adds process management programmable<->declarative (congruent) supervisor coprocesses and lifecycle hooks such that running a system becomes more like the Erlang BEAM runtime.

The sample code reminds me of PHP and Perl CGIs from 1999 where concerns are jumbled together. For a tiny hobby site that does one thing, sure, it's fine but for scalable, maintainable patterns there must be order, separation of looser concerns, and layering.

Cost Plus Drugs exist because the mega pharmacy chains have been colluding to keep prices of both patented and generic prescriptions artificially high. They're not pushing medications (that would require a physician's approval), but they are extracting money from patients once their doctor has done that.

Another problem with OTC is that it leads to healthcare discrimination based on income and insurance quality since these are often not covered.

The US desperately needs to do away with for-profit health insurance and mega hospital corporations, severely limit the patenting and absurd profiteering in pharma, and replace Medicaid and Medicare with better single-payer, universal healthcare like the rest of the world does more cheaply and with better outcomes.

Forking each sox command to the background causes samples to play non-deterministically and step over each other. Here's a better way:

    # Define notes for major seventh chord starting on A 440
    A=440
    C_SHARP=554.37
    E=659.25
    G_SHARP=830.61

    case "$layout" in
    Finnish)
      kitty +kitten themes --reload-in=all Apprentice &
      play "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $A" \
           "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $C_SHARP" \
           "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $E" \
           "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $G_SHARP" \
           vol -30dB 2>&- &
      ;;
    'English (US)')
      kitty +kitten themes --reload-in=all Default &
      play "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $G_SHARP" \
           "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $E" \
           "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $C_SHARP" \
           "|sox -np synth 0.2 sine $A" \
           vol -30dB 2>&- &
      ;;
    *) echo >&2 'Invalid $layout - must be "Finnish" or "English (US)"'; exit 1
    esac

So what really turned me off to this guy was his smarmy ~2019 campaign that also damaged my view of otherwise sensible Youtubers who shilled for him without thinking carefully. As such, pretending to save the planet while failing at math, logic, and physics because getting rich and being a internet->real celebrity are oh so much more important™ than emotionally and financially exploiting your audience or doing what you say you're going to do. sigh

"#TeamTrees vs. REALITY" (2019, Phil Mason) https://youtu.be/gqht2bIQXIY

Reminds me of Transmeta Crusoe. Innovative but insufficiently performant.

OTOH, LISP stack-based machines were fairly successful in their day.

Hack is pretty awesome, but it's difficult to build from source and find doc on. (Like a lot of Meta stuff, it's not well abstracted and maintained for external consumption and it's missing pieces and support materials.) In a lot of ways, reminds me of other tools without nice build processes like nix, bazel, klee, perl's cpan, istio, and samurai (ninja build's twin). Downloading binaries from the internet maybe convenient but aren't suitable for all uses, esp. distro packaging.

Tools with nice build processes: golang, (free)nginx, beanstalkd, memcached, erlang, elixir, rust, uv, pipx, and pnpm. RPM packages.

Tools with okay build processes: gradle, gcc, clang/LLVM. cmake. DEB packaging. GNU's stuff is more-or-less consistent, but autotools (automake/autoconf/m4) configure scripts are sequential, slow, and pedantically redundant. Haskell is a pain to build from source, because like go, it requires bootstrapping... which is difficult on a new platform; PSA: please don't bootstrap languages without a maintained, functioning, widely-portable, alternative reference implementation.

Tools that need improvement: openssl's configure flags are poorly documented but they're better than they were, ruby and ruby native extensions. conan. A number of Apache's (mostly Java) projects are prone to enterprise overengineering, XML, excessive but outdated features, too many options, and lack of simplicity and sane defaults. JVM (Java and not) apps can be JITed fast, portably, and run securely, but.. there's a complexity management tax and gotchas overhead. Scala footgunned itself going corporate, but Clojure and Kotlin are decent.