retrocryptid

did anyone else see this one?

https://www.amazon.com/complete-information-provided-provide...

Why?

I don't think my watch has a history setting.

Wow. What a hot mess of a web page: the undismissable donation dialog, the 1"x1.5" viewable area, and the unresponsive links.

I mean, I get it, I'm not viewing it on the most recent iPhone, but if you want me to donate, crafting a web page that's useless on mobile isn't the way to do it.

I guess I could install opera and see if that works.

It's all in version control. Get is our house favorite. Documentation for the product is in the product's repo.

You just had to have been there. Sure Interactive made a better Unix than Coherent, but it required a 386. MINIX wasn't out quite yet. Apple's Unix required an expensive Mac. 68k based workstations were expensive. I ran Coherent on a 286 I inherited.

In this era people were accustomed to platforms offering slightly different Dev tools and capabilities. When you wanted an apple ii program to run on a c64, you had to PORT it. There was no java. There was no gcc. The STL was neither S, nor exclusively T or L. C compilers were often proprietary, written by companies making hardware. And had different takes on the language. The reason that C89 is called C89 is the standard was ratified in 1989, almost a decade after coherent was first released.

In '89, paying $500 for Interactive/386 made sense. But in '85, you couldn't do that, so $100 for coherent on a 286 or even 8086 was a decent alternative.

or this one... https://youtu.be/V00Crn56wk0?si=W36uEA20Ce6BwaDr

is it tacky to dance on a war criminals grave? probably, but i'm not sure i care at the moment.

Also, this seems to imply innovation equals new features. In my day, we had an "innovation process" where we found "lead customers" with specific requirements they would pay for. If we then found a lot of people would pay for the same feature, it became a "capital f" Feature, managed by a product manager and tracked through the dev process. Mostly we found a bunch of different customers with similar, but different requirements. We then worked out an API or hardware interface third parties could use to meet customer's specific requirements at a price point the customer would accept.

But... now we just buy whatever HP or Apple ships and hire an intern to manually do the thing we were trying to automate.

I'm old, what's a "mutual ask"?

It turns out that Africa and India are on different continents and do not refer to the same place.

It depends. If you're working a "bullshit job," it may be enhanced by AI. As Alan Blackwell points out, ChatGPT is a bullshit generator. But David Graeber documented many people were working "bullshit jobs."

If you're working a bullshit job, maybe ChatGPT will enable unforseen vistas of productivity in your career field.

https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/blog/afb21/oops-we-automated-bulls...

[citation needed]

Seems on par with HP common operating procedure. A decade ago we ordered a couple of laptops that were discounted by 15%. The story on the website was they were a generation past their prime, so they were new laptops being sold at a discount.

When they arrived we discovered the keyboards didn't work. HP refused to honor their warranty commitment.

HP was removed from our vendor list and that of the California state government agency we were providing support services for.

One more way for Amazon to put a microphone in your home office.

Well... that's the American Way. Rich people can do what they want. Poor people are screwed. People in the middle have various privileges.

"This reads like a rant in lawsuit form."

Well... welcome to Texas.

If you can afford to leave Texas, you generally do. My hometown in North Texas is (I believe) the largest town in the country without mass transit. Quality of life there takes a bit of a hit. But instead of not taxing people for a service they're not offering, they tax people and then give it to corporate or real estate interests. So... it's expensive and low quality of life.

Everyone I graduated high school with has moved on to cheaper places (Oklahoma or Arkansas or nearby smaller towns) or places with a higher quality of life (California or New York or nearby cities like Dallas or Austin.)

A couple of people I graduated from high school with had their homes condemned so the state could seize the real estate and sell it to Jerry Jones or George Bush for sports stadia. So the idea that Texas is some sort of libertarian utopia is a bit of a myth.

I still love visiting, and my childhood memories of canoeing along the Brazos are cherished. Most everyone I've met in Texas is a decent human being.

But damn... what a shit show. High property taxes, bad politics, substandard infrastructure, public schools that are plummeting in national ratings, mediocre health care (except Houston, maybe). It's great if your primary concern is a cheap house and inexpensive low-quality food.

But like I said above... if you can afford to move, you do.

I'll add another +1 for Termux on an android phone. I have a hub that lets me charge my phone and plug a real keyboard into my android device.

It (termux) is mildly annoying as you don't get to set your own username and you can't ssh into your phone (or maybe you can if you're on a rooted device.)

Also, there's no sixel support, so it's somewhat limited as a remote management platform.

But I've successfully scp'd remote files to local, then used emacs to modify the files and then scp them back. Git works fine, so you can clone, branch, commit and push if that's your workflow. Make and gcc all work fine, so you can compile other tools (prolog, scheme, node) if you need them.

Sbcl should work, but I ran into problems compiling I haven't yet resolved (not sure it isn't related to me monkeying around with local library links) so ymmv.

I know python is available via the package system, but I'm not a python person.

It IS definitely a terminal oriented experience. If you're looking for something like VSCode, this ain't it.

Jason Lanier looks an awful lot like Jaron Lanier. I wonder if they're related?

Which is, of course, my snarky way of suggesting the original youtube poster may have misread Jaron's name. Or maybe overly-aggressive, overly-trusted auto-correct?

I've often thought that if the American libertarian party renamed themselves "The LeGuin Party" they might get a lot more members.

Hmm. Just thinking about west meeting east... Hiroshima Mon Amour is, in many ways, a cyberpunk work in the way the concept of memory as a first-class character with its own life is in clear display.

Good list, but Orson Scott Card is a bit over-represnted. I recently re-read scheismatrix (plus) after 35 years. My spouse found a copy of Burning Chrome in the local tiny library, so I'm likely to review a few more cyberpunk works. I have fond memories of the 64-83 era, but it took me a while to warm to Sterling and Gibson. It almost seems like every new sci-fi story has a bit of cyberpunk embedded in it. All the cyberpunk authors were (I believe) influenced by Ballard and PKD.

Anyway. Thx for the pointer.

Man. Someone really likes PKD. And sure, his stories are great reality-benders. Maybe we could use a little bit more of that these days. And I love Ballard. I think PKD is slightly over-represented on this list and Ursula K Leguin slightly under-represented. But I'm happy to see some of the other authors made the cut.

I think if I were to do a list like this I would pick 10 or 12 authors from the era and mention which works express the literary zeitgeist.

Dang. Maybe I SHOULD do that.

Oh man. Loved that film when I was a kid. Partially responsible for me studying CS.

Sadly, Urbit is forever tarred by one of its contributors. I'm not saying it's not worth investigating. It is. But why put your energies in a software project which already has a cultural strike against it? It's sort of like maintaining RieserFS: technically interesting but upsetting the social nature of programming humans.

I think they want to push users away so they have an excuse to EoL Maps.

In 2009 I had extensive conversations with the design team. The scale device is a critical feature for people who want to use the maps app as a map. Google's response to it's removal then was they expected people only use the maps app as a "background upon to place directions." That's why they only display major street names, only display ranges in the context of directions and keep removing the scale device.

It's not a map application, it's a wayfinder.

I'm re-reading Mythical Man Month and recommend everyone re-read it at least every other decade. Also Geddy Lee's bio and finishing my re-read of Burrough's Soft Machine. It's still as random as I remember from my childhood, though more realistic. I think that means reality is getting more Burroughsian as I get older.

But not the "real mode windows."

Windows 11 and Windows 10 are the same OS.