pcblues

I agree with that. I just don't like big numbers being used to cause emotional responses without proper context. Probably on a spectrum, but it's my beef :)

Personal data cannot be secured. The only way is to not store it. That will (imaginationaly) cost companies in lost revenue for being unable to mine and sell it. Only government can make laws against a company taking your personal information and selling it. Even passwords shouldn't be stored by a company.

The years of lost time argument is disingenuous. Over that number of people, 209 years of lost time from 700 million years of lives is nothing.

A thing I used OneNote for was easy OCR.

I think I have stayed on target with your arguments, but I'd like to push back a little or widen the view...

Re WYSIWIG:

Rather than WYSIWIG being bad, I think the introduction of scroll bars destroyed WYSIWIG from the start. It only works on a large monitor where one page can be viewed and worked upon. In the early 1990s it was only at uni or in the workplace that this was possible. Not at home on a 12 inch monitor. It's the same reason that a web page that is larger than the screen is a health nightmare (mentally and for poor mouse wrists).

Re computing using spreadsheets:

This made computing available to people who couldn't program imperatively. It's given more power to the average power user than you can imagine. See Scott Hanselman's interview with Oz du Soleil. https://hanselminutes.com/532/data-literacy-and-the-usefulne...

Re data storage:

Without the ability to program in a declarative way (i.e. SQL) it is going to be difficult to both store and retrieve data in a provably ACID way, yet non-programmers still get it done well enough with files.

Re Smalltalk:

Without OO knowledge, this great tool will not be useful to any desktop computing power user that has not formally learnt programming.

My point is that the tools that have survived and got the job done in the "computerised office" have not required the understanding of a complete pseudo-math model (aka programming paradigm) in order to get useful work done. People did not need to be able to compile a program without errors. They used tools that can be iteratively hacked upon, and allowed non-purist tech people to become power users in the workplace.

TL;DR

Models of software environments that do not have to be programmable have proved themselves and the people who use them capable of getting the job done. That can't be replaced by your suggested model.

Why would I think my career was something that would fail if I didn't engineer the hell out if it. Markets blame you.

It looked better when Bruce Willis was doing it (reasoning) with Milla Jovovich.

Amen. This is a full e-marketplace I mixed together as a demo. It runs on a USD$10/mth VPS. No other overheads, licence fees, etc.

https://donate.pcblues.com/

You don't have to worry about spiking because it's a "turn-based" business transaction site. So if you need two hours to shift to a larger server as the number of buyers and sellers increases, you have it.

PSA: Your personal experience of climate change resulting in "We are all going to live horribly in the future" is quite dependent on the definition of "we"

I think some technical writers in the past could also write novels (i.e. Jerry Pournelle) and the transfer of ability and knowledge would go both ways. So when you read a manual like the one for the Jupiter Ace, it is an absolute joy.

"You may well be wondering by this stage why the computer isn't taking any notice of all this rubbish you've typed in. The reason is not that it's already noticed it's rubbish, but simply that it hasn't looked yet. It won't take any notice until you press what is just about the most important key on the keyboard, the one marked ENTER (on the right-hand side, one row up)."

http://jupiter-ace.co.uk/downloads/JA-Manual-First-Edition-[...

It's just an offer to communicate, not a business.

If you are interested in setting up your own non-profit org marketplace or know someone who does, I made an example one using free tools (https://donate.pcblues.com/) that costs me only about $10 USD per month to host the example because it is just a hosted linux VM and not Saas or software subscription based. I configured the VM myself and then "just" installed the software and configured it. It hasn't been down for ages. I only just remembered to check it. It does everything from merch and service websites to escrowed payment transactions, user reputation, etc.

I have no meat, and I must scream.

Thanks for sharing. There's a time and place for belief based on subjective experience. That's nearly all the time, but many don't accept that :)

The idea that people shouldn't take you at your own word in order to accept your belief is interesting, though. The religion was pretty much word of mouth for most of its spread. Why not from you?

This is most definitely not snarky. You piqued my interest and I try to work out my doctrine with fear and trembling ;)

Having just completed a first year university philosophy subject on the matter I feel I am an expert and will share the answer.

The people who think they are living in a simulation because they can't argue their way out of it should tell the people who accuse them of it to prove it.

(I think I passed the subject. Waiting for the results.)

/ please appreciate the humour in that I know nothing more than I knew last year

I studied CWEB when I did computer science in the early 1990s (eek!).

While it is a way to document and compile your programs from a single file, it still contains the problem of where the story of a program should happen, and in keeping the documentation and code in line and up to date with each other.

It should also be understood that the documentation is for other programmers and not users, since the printout of the document includes the code in-line.

I won't be the first or last to say these three things:

The internet was meant to stop reliance on single sources (in case of nuclear war)

The size of a house of cards increases the number of failure points

Marketers lie

When I lived in Melbourne, I found someone's car with GOATSE as the personalised licence plate and of course took a photo. This was only about 10 years ago. I've got the photo still. It was a fantastic rude word filter reach-around against the registration office, so to speak.

We had the equivalent tape recorder for the Atari 800 (the 410). Since Dad was an electrical engineer he drilled a hole into the top and gave us a screwdriver to adjust the azimuth to get particularly hard to load tape programs to load.

The downside is that we would save our own programs on cassettes with one azimuth and then have to screw around (literally) to find the azimuth we had recorded it on in order to be able to load the program again.

We seemed to have endless time and patience in those days as a kid. We would spend hours trying to load a game from a cassette, or a whole day typing in a program from a magazine only to have the computer crash before we could save it to cassette. And then start again.

Dad was a polymath. He used pen plotters to map out his VLSI designs in the 1980s and taught VLSI at CIT in Melbourne. I remember as a kid watching the magic as the diagram unfolded on A3 paper. I also remember my grandmother bought a four colour plotter for her home pc (Oric Atmos I think). She put herself through business systems in the 70s at night school, too. Probably enough genes there to get me into software dev :)

(Edit for Atom to Atmos - twas a long time ago)

I'm not sure whether neurofancy people confabulating should be given an honest bill of truth health based on their category.

Sounds like #believeallconfabulators :)

Honest communication is difficult for some people to assess, and not for others. But I think we should learn from any recent #believeall... that we shouldn't base trust ratios on categorisation.

Honest communication is difficult to do, like weight-lifting, and takes a lot of practise to do well.

It also makes your BS meter more finely attuned, so is a good practise.

With that in mind, you will think this is arrogant to say if you lie for a living but not if you regularly tell the truth: Liars lie with liars and lie to rid themselves of truth troubles.

Think about that when you next talk to a chatbot/human confabulator :)

Hopefully the testing avoided disk caching artifacts.

Location: Townsville, QLD, Australia

Remote: Please, if not in Townsville

Willing to relocate: No, family comes first

Technologies: MSSQL (22 years), C#, others

Résumé/CV: https://pcblues.com/resume/

Email: markosborne@pcblues.com

(edit x 20: embarrassing number of edits to get a readable format)

Give it five years for the tech. Right now? Probably easier to get back with the ex to make the portrait correction.

/jk sorry

An ever-changing UI has an enormous and unaddressed cost on users. Continual re-learning without choice in order to achieve the same tasks as always.

I imagine this will be accelerated with constantly renewed AI-generated app experiences.

If a company could freeze the UI for a person once they have mastered it for what they want to do with it without sacrificing security, etc. (easy if they separate the concerns properly) I'd buy the product. I'd almost pay a subscription for them to keep it the same, like how I pay youtube a subscription to remove their ads.

I loved my MX Keys until I realised it was built with the same idea as the iPhone. I was meant to treat it as disposable/replaceable at the first sign of trouble. No user-serviceable parts. As soon as one key got sticky, that was the end of the experience with no way out without paying more money.

Next favourite is their K295. For some reason, it clicks with me (a joke because it is silent). All keys available and in the right position and a nice accurate mouse. Most importantly, the function keys are separate from the media keys, meaning less key presses.

My third favourite wireless keyboard/mouse combo cost $7 at a supermarket. Sometimes you just hit the jackpot with cheap manufacturing. I have to remember to go back and buy ten more when this luck occurs.

For reference, I've bought and used at least 20+ keyboards and/or mouses.

There is a problem with responsibility. Do you want to never let a perp go (i.e. jail innocent people in order to catch every guilty person) versus let some baddies slip through the net while not imprisoning innocent people. My own life found itself on the nexus, where I lost loved ones with a false accusation, but wasn't charged for it from (obvious) lack of evidence. Although the legal system worked somewhat, it was too late for me and my loved ones. The liars got away with it, and mission accomplished in removing me from the family.

Thanks. This was fun piece of writing to read with a nice premise. And something to hopefully remember when a busy week leaves me wired rather than tired.

This is amazing. I might have missed it, but is there a plan to put the dev issues onto github, or is there another way I can get involved in dev/doc?

Stringray? I clicked because I hadn't heard of that before :)

Jekyll provided me with a quick and dirty website publishing tool that works for what I want.

I don't want it to change. It's slow to run, but I edit my templates and run a single bash script to update my site when I need to.

I'm a data point for "I don't need a faster Jekyll, especially if compatibility breaks"