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Ah, it was actually STeve:

https://ataricrypt.blogspot.com/2024/03/steve.html

An application that was more a random selection of tools than a cohesive whole but some people swore by it.

I still have the printed documentation and floppy for Tempus, the editor which I think is the predecessor to the linked word processor. It was blazing fast because it had been written in 68000 assembly IIRC. Even then it would handle giant documents with ease.

Signum! was highly opinionated. It ran on the Atari ST but did its own thing for the user interface. You could access a lower layer of drawing primitives and obviate GEM. In those days multitasking did not exist.

There were a good number of these kinds of application back then. Steve was one, GFA Basic another.

Signum! (don't forget the exclamation point!) was an amazing piece of software. The key to its incredible print quality: carefully hand-crafted pixel fonts with incredible attention to detail.

With a 24-pin printer the output beat vector fonts on a 300dpi laser printer at the time. The actual resolution was higher than a single pass of printing with the 24 pins. Signum! would advance the print head in minute amounts and overprint to achieve its remarkable quality.

Printing a single page at maximum quality took a while... Think minutes per page instead of pages per minute. But it was very impressive.

Fond memories!

Well-written and it expresses a mood, a feeling, a sense of both loss and awe. I was there too in the 8-bit era, fully understanding every byte of RAM and ROM.

The sense of nostalgia that can turn too easily into a lament is powerful and real. But for me this all came well before AI had become all consuming... It's the just the latest manifestation of the process. I knew I didn't really understand computers anymore, not in the way I used to. I still love coding and building but it's no longer central to my job or lif3. It's useful, I enjoy it but at the same time I also marvel at the future that I find myself living in. I've done things with AI that I wouldn't have dared to start for lack of time. It's amazing and transformative and I love that too.

But I will always miss the Olden Days. I think more than anything it's the nostalgia for the 8-bit era that made me enjoy Stranger Things so much. :)

That reads differently to me. The company is doing the letting go. Like letting loose. Or letting fly. It's agency on the part of the company. Letting them see. All of these will have euphemistic overtones as no company will want to say that they axed 10,000 people.

Correct. There's nothing vague about "the burglar was shot by me."

It's passive but crystal clear.

Cause in this context specifically refers to the employee having done something wrong or illegal and means the employee is guilty of misconduct.

Data is the plural of datum so using the verb in the plural is arguably not wrong. I wouldn't use it like that but I think in certain Englishes it's acceptable (British?). Some mass singular nouns in British English idiomatically take plural verbs as well, e.g. the police are.

Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. [0]

Virgil.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix,_qui_potuit_rerum_cogn...

Is that because Brazilian regulations prohibit it? Or lawyers being too cautious?

The actual problem as explained in the first two paragraphs of TFA and shown in the first picture, is that the light and dark blue sides of the Finder icon have swapped sides. For the first time in its existence of many decades, the dark side is now on the right instead of the left. This is the problem.

Looks wrong to me too!

This is sad... I've been using Synology for a very long time (over 15 years?) and have been pretty happy with my experience. The one time I needed their tech support also left me with a good impression...

This however is a deal breaker for me as I'd hate to be locked in to their drives for all the reasons in TFA but also as a matter of principle.

I hope Synology will reconsider!

That would be a poffer, as the interstitial t is added to words ending in r when forming the diminutive.

And no, I didn't know what a poffer was either. :)

Also from TFA:

"Thanks for your patience in waiting for this article! After publishing my piece on EgyptAir 804 in December, I moved half way across the country in a long, messy relocation process fraught with other struggles along the way. But here I am, and here it is. Thank you!"

I suspect that mold is not as narrow as you think. I bought most of my Sonos setup over a decade ago and it's still going strong because I never upgraded from the S1 app. It's the newer S2 app that has been horrendous.

I would not buy or recommend new Sonos products now. Occasionally I do think about adding to my setup but since the update debacle that's no longer an option. Over the years my Sonos has been pretty reliable, and very importantly, the wife and kids can use it easily. We just want "Play X in Room Y." It works very well for that. Even my nerdy self is OK with that... I have plenty of other things to nerd/worry about and I just want my music to play.

I did have a period of instability after I moved some Sonos speakers around, and I must say their tech support was pretty good (this was maybe four years ago). They looked at my logs and told me it was a weak signal issue, which I thought was ridiculous and initially dismissed... but after digging some more and troubleshooting my home signals, it turns out they were right.

Old Sonos with old S1 app is still great for me! It really pains me to see how far they have fallen.

Just scanned some files and I see a lot of NOPs, sometimes a few consecutively. Any idea why?

The "It Might As Well Be Swing" album by Frank Sinatra with the Count Basie band was my introduction to Quincy Jones, who did the arrangement. It is one of my favorite albums in Sinatra's discography.

I agree it's actually a well crafted layoff announcement. I wouldn't even faulting for using Dropboxers. If layoffs have to happen there are much worse ways of announcing and implementing them than this. Still very unpleasant if you're affected... (been there...)

My Python skills are pretty limited, so it's likely I am missing what's obvious, but I don't understand what the purpose of this library is. "Modeling financial instruments" is vague; is it for backtesting? Calculating option pay-offs? Tracking portfolio P&L? Risk management? Is there an example of what you would use it for?

I can see the Portfolio class, but it somewhat confusingly uses "Trades" to describe more complex positions (I had assumed a Trade was selling or buying an instrument), and the instruments included are fairly limited. I don't see any bonds, currencies, interest rates, swaps, and others but it looks like an early work in progress, so that's fine. Is it meant to be a generic toolkit to cover the vast majority of financial instruments? I don't understand how characteristics of the instruments are calculated/updated or aggregated into Portfolios.

Some sample code/projects would help me immensely in understanding! (Again, I blame my lack of Python skills).

My apologies for the basic questions!

It need not be active to send a message. If you build a giant diamond cube or some other gigastructure, it could last for billions (?) of years even after the builders have become extinct. You need it to be detectable at interstellar distances, but the message is simply "we were here once." Maybe you could encode your civilization's knowledge on the gigastructure itself for visitors.

You can do this through COM. I forgot which Python library I used but once you have an Excel application object you can do

Data = xl.range('a1:a3')

Sum = xl.worksheetfunction.sum(data)

Xl.range('b3').value = sum

Any library enabling the COM link will do.

(sorry, typing this on my phone so formatting and capitalization are screwy)

You can access the VBA object model from Python once you've got a COM conduit. There are a few Python libraries to allow you to do this; you'll be able to write VBA-like code in Python accessing Excel's internals in a similar manner. Debugging can be a bit painful though. I've done this both from Matlab and from Python, and it's fine for smaller projects, writing structured/formatted Excel workbooks, etc.

I agree that Excel as a GUI can be phenomenal.

The CDAX index has about 360 companies and appears to have a market cap of around 2 trillion EUR vs 1.7 trillion for the DAX 40.

The vision is that the cost per unit of mass to orbit will come down massively with Starship, once it's launching like the Falcon. That will open up hitherto unimaginable missions and markets. And customers. It's all about the the cost!

They used three different kinds of prompts with varying levels of restrictions, as described in the paper.

To be quite honest, I assume you made your comment so that you could dismiss the paper without reading it.

In addition I'd add that homelessness still exists in Singapore, albeit at a very low level, estimated at about 1,000 people out of a population of 6 million. ChannelNewsAsia did a feature on homelessness here a while ago:

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/watch/homeless-singapore/why...

Where in the Wikipedia page does it seem say so? I can't find anything relevant but then again I don't understand all of it.

This is sad, at one point I played KSP 1 a lot and I agree it didn't need much upgrading. I had been hearing about KSP 2 for a while but hadn't really followed it. I'll fire up my old copy later today in loving memory...

The linked article is a bit sparse on detail but you can read the actual paper as well (not paywalled to my surprise):

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24923