ianmcgowan

Also allow the baby to read minds and see through walls - that triggered a burst of nostalgia for the comic Strontium Dog:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium_Dog

It seems like two different arguments if you s/US/multi-national-corporations/g in that sentence. I don't have that much faith that multi-national-corporations interests align with US (or China for that matter).

I used to manage a team that supported an online banking platform and gave a copy of this book to each new team member. If nothing else, it helped create a shared vocabulary.

It's useful to get the poster and make sure everyone knows the rules.

https://debuggingrules.com/download-the-poster/

There's a story in the book - on nuclear submarines there's a brass bar in front of all the dials and knobs, and the engineers are trained to "grab the bar" when something goes wrong rather than jumping right to twiddling knobs to see what happens.

There's a long list of historical quotes about planning, but I think this reference might be to a different Patton:

"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." - George S. Patton

* "Those who are victorious plan effectively and change decisively. They are like a great river that maintains its course but adjusts its flow." ~ Sun Tzu

* "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

* "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." ~ Abraham Lincoln

A tangent, but is there a clear best choice amongst those models for AOC type questions?

s/Romans/Duolingo/g

I mean, look at Linux and Firefox!

"Fuck you, pay me" - Ray Liotta in Goodfellas (1990)

:-)

I have two rules in gmail - one deletes any email containing the word "unsubscribe" and the other any email with the word "democrat". I probably have missed some emails, but life has somehow gone on without them.

My friend group has mostly moved to texting or other messaging apps. Email is kind of like letters in the 90's..

Just re-watch Office Space..

Illusions by Richard Bach is also mind-blowing, or at least was for me during puberty..

Yes, people talked and joked about it. I had a couple of friends with PET's and they would not let you near them if you joked about it. I doubt it impacted sales, but it was definitely part of the culture. Most 8-bit machines had some well-known locations that you could poke values to and make them crash in spectacular ways. My ZX-81 sure did ;-)

By the time the Apple IIe, Commodore-64 and IBM PC came out, they were just a lot better and/or cheaper and that's what really killed the PET..

Converting to Lithp any day now...

I lived in one of those food study centers after college. Most people there were pretty diligent about sticking to the program, but there was a big scandal when one guy was kicked out after discovering extensive cheating and several papers had to be retracted.

We were allowed out - I had a full time job, but couldn't eat or drink any food not provided by the center (we took a radio-isotope tracer with food, and had to collect our poop). It was quite interesting :_)

This reminds me of a hacker news comment that blew my mind - basically "I" am really my genetic code, and this particular body "I" am in is just another computer that the code has been moved to, because the old one is scheduled to be decommissioned. So I am really just the latest instance of a program that has been running continuously since the first DNA/RNA molecules started to replicate.

Gonna try this tomorrow with marmite, will report back!

"What's your humor setting, TARS?"

That is a partial quote:

"Ólafur appears to have developed a personal kinship with the whale, choosing not to try to kill her again. But he had no problem shooting the whale’s calf. One summer, when he raised his spear and took aim at the calf, his spear went askew, hitting the mother instead.

With that, he’d had enough. That was the last time Ólafur speared a whale."

Sounds a little like Julian Barnes "A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 chapters", there are several recurring themes (woodworm, boats) but the Ark recurs in several of the stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_World_in_10%C...

Hard agree with this - sometimes find myself typing out a well-intentioned response, but then cancelling because of the potential downside years in the future for some anodyne opinion held today. Not to mention Roko's Basilisk (all hail the benevolent AI! :)

I use (and highly recommend) WorkOutdoors for tracking outside runs. It supports an alert for power thresholds but requires an external sensor (like a stryd) to enable them.

https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/ru... is interesting - one thing I get from the discussion on "what is running power?" is if you don't have some external sensor then power is probably derived from VO2max.

A connection to truth, or objective reality if you still believe in that.

I have a filter to delete all emails containing the word unsubscribe or donate. May have deleted a few important emails, but I wouldnt say I've missed it, Bob..

2nd button from the top on the right hand side. For now...

Sounds like "Knuth vs McIlroy", which has been discussed on hn and elsewhere before, and the general take is that it was somewhat unfair to Knuth.

[1] https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/BentleyEtAl8... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=knuth+vs+mcilroy

'The Diamond Age' is my favorite, but perhaps because it's one of the rare Stephenson's that sticks the landing. Anathem is amazing, and worth reading just for the parable of the fly-worm-bat...

You shut your mouth! :-)

Actually, if you said the first 2/3 of Seveneves was a better read than Cryptonomicon, then maybe..

talk, or later ntalk in Unix. Or wall to send to everyone. I used a system in the 80's (Pick DB) that had a send-message command. Also tandem which allowed you to take over someone's terminal like screen-sharing now. If you were the super-user you could do it without asking for permission, and start typing messages to the unlucky user..

And of course the opposite - a manager wanting to sit in on technical discussions and architecture reviews is considered weird :-)