notbeuller

The youtube video linked has the toasters going north west to south east - they canonically travel from north east to south west. Did they flip the video to avoid a copyright claim?

Bill Stewart was by no means the author of after dark or the flying toasters[1] He did do the windows port of the screen saver engine and some modules, but that was years after they'd first shipped as part of the Mac version of After Dark.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_(software)

I used to have a registered port (in the 3000s) - didn’t get a lot of spam, but once I got a very angry phone call (!!!) from someone that tracked me down because their firewall blocked an incoming request in that port. They did their own research and decided it was my fault.

Years ago I got a job through a recruiter, left company A for B. She called me after a few months and asked me for the Compsny A internal directory - which I declined to provide and she got kind of nasty about it. Maybe ten years later I was at company C and my manager mentioned hiring a recruiter - same person. I mentioned our previous interaction (not out of spite, just a naive narrative) and they stopped working with her immediately. My point being - your behavior has a long tail, so don’t be trying to take advantage.

This reminds me of the trump lawyer who’s defense was “no reasonable person could’ve believed what I was saying”.

Was it only an insurrection if they succeeded?

Just because they were incompetent doesn’t mean they weren’t criminal.

One possible result of this that sounds dystopian cool - script kiddy kids < 16 spinning up mastodon server instances and creating their own very leaky insecure rolling social networks. Unless it suddenly becomes illegal to run a server without a license.

There was a rather silly 1976 thriller “Raise the Titanic!” predating it’s actual discovery by about 10 years. They made a movie from it too in 1980. Based on a premise that there was something valuable the government wanted on board)

In various Discworld books, Pratchett sort of unified Golumns with Asimov’s three laws robots.

I want to say it was at Sun in the mid 80s, most code lacked comments but there was one idiosyncratic data structure with field names having specific prefixes - with the comment “She’s Hungarian!” (Hungarian notation, presumably - and who was “she”?)

I’d been going since the mid 80s when it was “the foothill flea market” colloquially. I can’t say I’ve ever found any “wow, this is unique” things - honestly, most of the time it’s “neat” things that come home with me, get played with for a few years, and then I’ll buffer everything collected up and sell at the next flea market. In this way the hobby can be mostly self supporting - but it’s also very satisfying to return home with an empty station wagon.

It’s also a great way to reunite with coworkers from times past, although I have really a bad memory for faces.

Watching alt.religion.scientology in 1993 was very much like ogling a road accident. It was so weird how the adherents would attack the people that were leaking their church secrets - they literally had a playbook to follow - I guess there just modern public relations now.

This is the best. Offices with doors, as a semaphore for availability, and a close by common area for collaboration.

If collaboration occurs spontaneously and your door isn’t closed, it’s easy to join in. If it turns out that someone is essential, turn it into an actual design meeting.

The best teams I’ve worked on had this arrangement and developed their own cadence - morning walks for cofeee, water cooler tv show commonalities.

Having the refuge of a known private space made group participation easier - I would seek out and benefit from the social technical in person interactions, as opposed to an open office plan where I would start out with determination of defending my personal mental space at all costs.

I will often slap a dumb 3 line http server into my long running tools / applications for debugging - provide ReSTful channel to toggle debug flags. I “learned” html in the 90s and don’t use it otherwise, so <table> figures prominently in generating the structure of the page.

They don’t specify which god - perhaps one of the Eldritch horror type gods is being invoked and awoken!

I had the same thought - sweep it under the rug? Hide this until it starts to smell?

So many, many rants could come from this and my blood is boiling in fervent agreement. But two thoughts: as hard as it is to use the contrast-less, contextless obscure icons and "is it checked or toggled or active", try working with someone and having to explain "click that thing, I don't know what it is, no, the other one, to the left, arghghhg."

But really, maybe these aren't our interfaces anymore - the lack of scrollbars on macOS is because of the touch, pinch and swipe touch interfaces, and the people that are now very happily consuming content (and creating, although less so) without having to worry about that extra bit of information. But the rest of us suffer, and the "increase contrast" and "reduce motion" checkboxes don't do nearly enough to reconfigure the UI.

I never really appreciated the Mac modding community[1] (kaleidoscope?) and the powerful frameworks they had to build UIs, 90% of which I'd happily switch to today if I could.

[1] https://botsin.space/@osxthemes/111416576638238992

There’s a character in “the truth” by Terry pratchett that ostensibly swears a lot in the book - “I don’t have any -ing friends”, etc. but it turns out he’s literally saying -ing (that being the joke). And I will never not think about if I encounter a .ing domain.

I got a little “looks like a key but is a foldable pocket knife” as a gift a few years ago - and was amazed at how often I ended up using it.

Another series along these lines I’ve been meaning to finish watching: “Moonbase 3”[1] from the bbc. James Burke (Connections, The Day the Universe Changed) was science advisor, although I don’t quite see how it helped overcome the inherent cheese.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonbase_3 -

Watching my 10 year old manipulate the mindcraft ui is mindblowing - she was anticipating the UI before it appeared. On the other hand, watching my officemate try to edit command lines by pressing left arrow 65 times fills me with rage. I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit where people aren't aware of the power of their tools.

And “Toms” - The Little Garden on El Camino in Mountain View with the wall of Sun Microsystems business cards. Some folks (no doubt still around on HN) started an ISP in the Bay Area named after it.

And now that I’m hungry and fantasizing, Flints BBQ on Shattuck in Oakland. Ribs in peace.

Cho’s Mandarin Dim Sum, California ave, Palo Alto (briefly moved to Los Altos before Cho retired). Open to suggestions for a replacement within 50 miles.

My company makes us use slack - started during lockdown - as an electron app. I don't know it's history or its user culture, but for me it has been a wretched experience all around and I wish we'd have just stuck with email, or jabber or whatever. Slack has a faux corporate friendliness that makes me feel like I'm in some corporate "we're having fun and a potentially pizza" dental appointment with a therac-25 rigged to make X-rays on flayed kittens. I don't ever want my software to say "oops" and I certainly don't want my business software to offer more ways to "engage" with irrelevant content.

I would like to once again ask people to consider the abundant possibilities inherent in just not going anywhere.

I was talking to someone at a vintage computer meetup this weekend and we ended up talking about "fear" in exactly this context - fear of asking, or fear that we couldn't know something or that it was too hard. From my perspective it was for exactly things like signals that were not intuitive or broke my mental model of linear programming (threads too, when they first became popular). He was an artist and his fear had been around not understanding what other people are doing with their art, or if his art was getting his message across.

In both our cases, we benefitted from having mentors that helped explain (like this fine article does) by breaking things down and then... letting us learn from the broken down pieces rather than all at once. A mentor can help us conceptualize difficult concepts by showing us, intuitively where to draw our abstractions.

Overcoming the fear for both of us came down to acknowledging it, "owning it", and being ok with it. (Sorry if this is rambling, but it was one of the most rewarding conversations I've had in years, and touched at least tangentially on this article.)

(And I'm still have fear of MMUs, but I've never had to write anything at that level, although it's on my programming bucket list...)

I know now that it’s a dog (the fetch icon), but I thought it was a koala for more than 20 years!

It so reminds me of Douglas Adam's Electric Monk from Dirk Gently:

"The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah."

There was an old peanuts cartoon[1] where Linus suddenly becomes “aware of his tongue” - and Lucy gets angry because she comes aware too. A lot of spam ads I see these days reference tinnitus - and that’s when I notice it.

[1] https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1963/02/03