jes

Yep.

Echelon is one keyword I remember.

M-x psychoanalyze-microsoft-pinheads

I am 62. About fifteen years ago I could have written almost exactly what you have written above. I blew up my long term marriage because of my fucked up thinking. It was a horrible mistake and one that I regret essentially every day.

Of course, maybe it's all different for you. I mean that. I'm only suggesting something to check.

Have a look at the material under "Nice Guy Syndrome" by Dr. Robert Glover. [1] Maybe get his audio book "No More Mr. Nice Guy" and listen to it for a bit, and see how well it fits or does not fit your situation.

[1] https://drglover.com

Back when I was hiring people, I would have probably hired you on the spot, if you said Scheme was your favorite programming language. But that's just me.

More to your point, it would have been fine to collect your things, get up from the table, and say something like "Thank you for this opportunity to talk. I wish you well." or something like that.

Not nasty, not sarcastic, just relaxed and confident.

Cultivating an ability to be genuinely more or less indifferent to what arises in my life (to be non-reactive) has been working very well for me.

I wish you the best.

I'd love to find an old TI DS-990/10 system. Used one in 1979 for a few years. Good times, implementing Kernighan and Plauger's code from Software Tools in Pascal.

iMessage is next to useless for me due to SMS spam from political fundraising groups that send texts from so many different numbers that manually blocking each phone number is practically impossible.

I want an app that will prowl my pool of SMS texts on my phone every couple of minutes and delete every SMS text that matches a regexp I give it, without sending all of my texts off-device.

Back in the 70s, I dialed a number on my parent’s rotary phone. When the remote computer answered, I would shove the handset into the earmuffs on the acoustic coupler[1].

It usually worked. I don’t remember if the baud rate was 300 or 110.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

I used The Google and found these links:

0. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-...

1. https://www.securityweek.com/investigation-launched-role-jet...

2. https://www.zdnet.com/article/jetbrains-denies-being-involve...

TIL 1Password has a command line tool named op.[1] It requires authenticating with your 1Password credentials and any granted authentication is said to time out after 30 minutes.

It looks useful and I'm thinking about downloading it, but if I did, I might not leave the binary as-named and I probably wouldn't locate it in /usr/local/bin, etc.

[1] https://support.1password.com/command-line-getting-started

I got a lot of pleasure from Usenet / Nutnews back in the day.

I sometimes wonder if I should try to find an NNTP feed and a version of rn (1) and check it out again.

My experience may be similar. I started programming in COBOL in 1979 - 1980 timeframe. I was working in Seattle, Washington, using Ryan-McFarland COBOL on a Texas-Instruments DS-990 computer system. I thought it was a good programming environment. We were writing business accounting software and it all worked really well.

I subscribed to the app and used it almost daily for a few years. I found it helpful.

I'm 62 and if I'm understanding you, it's been the same for me the last four or five years. I received a lot of benefit from Sam's work, as well as from Alan Watts, Francis Lucille, Robert Wolfe, and other Advaita Vedanta / non-dual teachers.

This journey has greatly increased my ability to feel compassion for all people, even people that I think are acting unkindly and doing great damage in the world.

Just for grins, here's a YouTube channel that I think you might enjoy:

https://www.youtube.com/c/SamaneriJayasara

I get chills when I listen to her version of the Bloodstream Sermon, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_DzXYI7xRU

I used to love Adobe FrameMaker. I was surprised to see it is still available. We were using it for tech pubs writing 30 years ago, if memory serves. I thought it was much more usable for that purpose than Microsoft Word.

I first discovered the Theory of Constraints and Eli‘s work in about 1992. I was also able to get a copy of Bill Dettmer‘s course notes for the course he was teaching at USC at the time on the Thinking Processes.

I’ve been a fan of TOC and the TP ever since.

That being said, I think there is a certain kind of danger for certain people. It’s possible to spend a great deal of time and effort building paper tigers. That happened to me, probably because of certain aspects of my personality at the time.

The danger as I see it is that as possible to spend too much time in your head and not enough time out actually interacting with people in the real world working to accomplish your goals.

So I recommend TOC and the TP to people. But they’re also not enough, especially if you’re prone to investing large amounts of time in analysis and planning and not much time in actually executing. Both are needed.

> and clunky in-circuit-emulators…

I wrote software for in-circuit emulators from Applied Microsystems back in the late 80s and early 90s. I was fortunate to be able to work with some really talented people.

Our high-end ICEs were expensive, maybe $40K at the time. I can think of at least one company that bought 120 of them from us, although most of our customers only bought a few.

A lot of NRE went into building such systems. And yes, I think they probably were clunky yet capable of some amazing things when it came to debugging embedded systems.

Can you say more about this? I have never heard about this.

To my knowledge, my bank cannot access my safe deposit box without my key or without drilling and replacing the lock my key opens.

Am I mistaken about this?

In the late 70s and early 80s I did a lot of programming on Texas Instruments DS/990 computer systems.

The manuals for those systems were quite interesting.

If you had a question, you could read the manual and swear that the manual did not answer the question.

Once you figured out the answer by some other means, if you went back to the manual and read it carefully you would discover that it actually did answer the question precisely.

I don’t think it was just me. Several of the people that I worked with on that project reported the same thing.

I really enjoyed working on the 16 bit mini computers from Texas Instruments. They were a lot of fun.

Loosely quoting Eli Goldratt, "Until the money is in your bank account and there is no possibility of having to refund it to the customer, you have not made the sale."

Indeed.

MFJ in the amateur radio community is called "Mighty Fine Junk" fairly often. I have purchased some things from MFJ, but I notice that I now avoid doing so unless I'm desperate.

What if Craig Wright is suffering from mental health problems similar to those that affected Terry Davis, the author of Temple OS?

I understand the Craig Wright is violating the norms of public behavior. I think it would be more charitable to not assume that he’s necessarily in his right mind.

In a real chain, only one link is actually the weakest, and it is at that link where the chain will break, in the hypothetical you offer.

Doesn’t every (US) government job provide most of that, except maybe free college?

If you work for the IRS or the USPS, don’t you get guaranteed work, public health insurance and a pension after some number of decades of service?

What if crypto currencies are to blame for low GPU prices?

In other words, what if the opportunity to make money via crypto currencies has accelerated the development of GPU capabilities and availability beyond what would have happened if crypto currencies never came into existence?

I see my former self in much of what you have written, and I still have those traits to a degree.

I have found men’s groups to be surprisingly helpful.

I also hew towards the Buddhist and Neo-Advaita spiritual traditions.

Wishing you good health and equanimity in the coming year.

My eldest daughter was born in 1985. When my wife went into labor, we drove in my pickup truck to the local hospital. Before she went into active labor in the early hours of the morning, we shared her hospital bed and watched an episode of “The Golden Girls” together. I treasure that sweet memory.

Years ago I found the video by Dr. Robert Sapolsky[1] to be a good introduction to the topic of depression. I also suffered a major depression of my own about six years ago. It was a horrible time in my life.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc

Am I allowed only one outrageous belief?

The Bloodstream Sermon[1] is literal and true.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_DzXYI7xRU

In general, if you manufacture and sell a product that can radiate radio frequency energy, it needs to conform to regulations from governmental agencies like the Federal Communications Commission in the United States.

I find manually laying out graphs and digraphs tedious.

It seems like a problem that should be amenable to machine learning approaches. Basically, training a machine as to what is an aesthetically pleasing layout and what is not.

Are there layout engines that use machine learning for layout, as against being implemented in terms of specific tree or graph layout algorithms?