PTOB

I approve of Latin jokes. Well done.

I'll bet someone's trying to run the New Outlook and classic Outlook at the same time.

No indication that the licking was consentual.

I am from a town that gets national news coverage only for Shenanigans like this.

Many of us — perhaps even the best of us — can sometimes be mistaken for AI bots.

Two of the things I love intersect here: good punctuation and engineering documents.

AI stole the em-dash from my toolkit.

I have memorized a group of useful Alt-codes for engineering documents. They include symbols for diameter, delta, degrees, dot product, and trademark among others. If you're of a certain age, you will remember how useful Alt+255 was for folder naming.

At the cusp of the 21st centuries, I added the Windows Alt-code for the em-dash. Compared to parentheses it is less jarring. Commas are dainty things. I use the em-dash, and I am human.*

* I confess that I also use semicolons; I still claim to be human.

... slowly losing all functionality until, suddenly, death.

As someone who has done architectural renderings for fun and profit, I highly approve of this. The greatest downfall of our contemporary "built environment," as folks call it, is how poorly modern materials age and weather.

Thanks for that link. Great starting point for me.

Things like this have had me scratching my head for decades.

Why would local governments annex property, upgrade utilities, and build new roads without moving that burden to the entities driving those things? They routinely do this for new residential developments in many jurisdictions, refusing to annex subdivisions until the residents have paid for the utilities and roads.

There seems to be no reason that the current residents of a region should consider paying for these things to benefit the owners of facilities that do not generate enough tax revenue to support the added costs. Hospitals, schools, water treatment facilities, roads for their own use may merit issuing bonds that can be paid off based on new or existing taxes. But asking folks making standard wages to pitch in over decades for a company which could pay for the needed upgrades with a few weeks of revenue makes little sense. It seems disingenuous on its face or downright negligent at worst.

Does anyone have a bead on resources that could help me learn more about how all this works [or doesn't]?

^ This right here.

Apple only gets a free pass from folks who are invested in that particular kind of ... relationship.

I see my comment was downvoted, and I apologize.

I meant to agree entirely with the parent comment by showing one specific way in which Win2K SP4 is far superior to Windows 11.

In Win2K, Task Manager takes less than a second to start on a 200 MHz, single core Pentium II with 64MB of RAM and a 5400 RPM IDE HDD.

Interesting. I don't find the TC to be ugly; I find it to be dissonant. It hurts my brain like missed harmonics in a musical performance do. Here are my reasons:

First thing I noticed on reveal day: it looks like a star ship from the the 1985 game, Elite.[0] It's a 3D model of a space ship for a computer that could barely keep up.[1] This design was a great starting point for a child's imagination, but even as a kid it was always assumed that this was the best we can do for now. The future would be far less disappointing. Verdict: this design isn't futuristic; it's nostalgic.

Looking down, I saw that its beautiful, shining, crystalline, space-going shuttlecraft aesthetic sits on matte, round, rubber wheels tied to the ground. It wants to fly, but it can't, and that is sad.

A few months later, I saw the unfortunate resemblance to industrial garbage receptacles usually kept out of site behind decorative enclosures. I realized that while designing one of those enclosures. Then the memes came.

I actually prefer a version I saw that was mounted on tracks for arctic environments.[2] It says, "I am a raw shard of ice carved from a massive glacier," and it pulls it off quite well.

[0] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/File:EliteShipIdentificationCh... [1] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/File:Elite_Animation.gif [2] https://s1.cdn.autoevolution.com/images/news/gallery/world-s...

It's my strong opinion that Windows 2000 Server, SP4 was the best desktop OS ever.

Meanwhile, in 2025, with 64GB RAM and solid state drives, we hear, "Windows 11 Task Manager really, really shouldn't be eating up 15% of my CPU and take multiple seconds to fire up."

Nearly nobody cares about ...

That's an accurate and sad truth about humanity in general, isn't it? We all feel safer and saner if we avoid thinking about how things really are. It's doubly true if our hands are dirty to some extent.

At the same time, I submit that ignoring the effectiveness of very small contingents of highly motivated people is a common failure mode of humanity in general. Recall that "nearly nobody" also describes "people who are the President of the United States." Observe how that tiny rounding error of humanity is responsible for quite a bit of the way the world goes - for good or ill. Arguably, that level of effectiveness doesn't even require much intelligence.

Why should they care about the same for AI which for most people is “out there online” somewhere?

Well, some will be smart enough to see the problem. Some portion thereof will be wise enough to see a solution. And a portion of those folks will be motivated enough to implement it. That's all that's required. Very simple even if it's not very easy or likely.

My favorite reading of _Frog and Toad Together_ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmHh29UfAco

Why is it ugly?

As someone who works on the design and construction of datacenters, I cannot stress enough how apropos this comment is. Even before the first conversation in your IDE starts, the load on national and local government resources, local utility capacity, and roadway infrastructure is enormous. We're all paying whether we're using the tools or not.

1958 Chevy Corvette. Looks way more futuristic.

As a utility designer in my day job who frequents HN for real fun, this comment hits hard.

In so far as it makes me feel the relief, awe, and pleasure of picking up a good tool, then by all means.

The mouse trail made me feel something else.

Let's test that:

1. Nothing stored in /dev/null is durable. 2. Nothing is stored in /dev/null. 3. Ergo, /dev/null exhibits durability.

Thank you, I'll take my check at the door.

Here's the rest of it: > ... well-constructed sentence.

This is a great question. One of the hardest lessons I've learned is that some people don't know that the choices they're making are going to hurt them.

There are children who are actively taught by the people they should be able to trust that belligerence, lying, and stealing will get them what they need in life. On the other side of the coin, there are children who are taught to assume that everyone else has the up-bringing and or at least the natural intelligence needed to enable good choices every time a moral dilemma is presented. Both - it turns out - are equally short-sighted.

What's worse is that many of us assume that others can easily change their entire worldview on a dime. In the middle of my life, I'm coming to accept that I need more years that will be available to me to fix all the broken parts of my psyche and intellect.

Precisely. "Luck" shouldn't be equivocated with "chance." We have two words for a reason.

Show up + embrace awkwardness + be kind and courteous and luck will follow.

My son's Scout troop was lucky this year. They just sold more than $60k worth of pop-corn in two weeks. How? Each kid walked up to hundreds of complete strangers at grocery stores and asked politely - albeit awkwardly sometimes. The exponentially lower-success approach is to sit behind a table waiting for people to hand you money.

The result? Almost 40 lucky kids get 11 all-expenses-paid camping trips and a fun summer camp all for just eight hours of walking and talking. Doesn't matter how much money their families make; every kid gets to fully participate.

Has he considered exactly how much concrete is needed to build a datacenter campus?

Man, I had to use Word Perfect in school in 1997. It seemed dumb at the time, but I learned some valuable lessons about markup and the importance of seeing hidden control characters to troubleshoot formatting issues.

I support this. "Windows XI" looks so much more professional and enigmatic.

My first bug fix ever was getting rid of that stupid tail that kept growing and wouldn't go away when you moved in NIBBLES.BAS.