PaulHoule

I used to feel that "I can plug so many great things into USB and they work so great!" and now it feels more like playing Russian Roulette. Like I had a Cooler Master keyboard plugged into my computer at work and it turned out that it had been causing interrupt storms for years that was making my computer slow and unresponsive. I plugged in a new keyboard and it was like getting a new computer.

Not a big surprise, the Windows audio system is not that robust and will reboot for the slightest reason and I think it's worse in recent versions of Win 11. I did a lot of things to try to get AirPods working properly on Windows and finally gave up because of this sort of instability.

I find it abjectly terrifying. Like if I log into your site with a Passkey what happens if my device breaks? What if some big tech company decides to nuke my account for no good reason?

Simply knowing it is possible to do something makes it easier to do.

Hard sell. I remember the time I went to GNC and they gave me a free sample of the notorious Jack3D which had some kind of amphetamine-like stimulant in it and was associated with young soldiers in the US Army falling down dead.

There was that time I was tripping on acid at 2am and was offended by hearing the same Doobie Brothers song that plays during my drive in and my drive out and called up the college radio station thinking, "I'm either going to talk to the janitor or the program manager", turns out the program manager picks up the phone and I ask him, "Who picks this music out?" and he says "I do" and that it's programmed on the computer. I told him "Come on, you can play anything you want to play" so he put on a Miles Davis disc.

My son got used to listening to the local classic rock station i100 and one thing that is really fun is that the DJ's are local performers and celebrities. The station promoted an event for Ronnie James Dio last weekend

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/dioday

and this guy and another DJ were there with their own bands

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116954456921377276

Even though the station is run by remote control much of the time and the sales manager recently got poached by the Buffalo Bills it's so much fun to get to know these people in real life. (I appreciate it how Billy, pictured, plays alternative rock, kinda like Green Day, even if the station's playlist got closed out around 1992)

My first take is that it is terrible terrible opsec to talk about this sort of thing if you actually want to take it across a border or have any kind of "elevated" encounter with law enforcement or intelligence.

Like if they have good tools for profiling you from your posts they'll totally expect the OP to have some interesting hardware and stories to tell. Contrast that to just being some boring guy who has a cover story that happens to be true or the colorful character who doesn't really have anything to hide but who can keep spooks talking for hours.

It wouldn’t be so bad if you buried it and it stayed buried it, but whatever disposal technology you use it doesn’t work if the plastic is never properly disposed of. Even if people are really careful, for instance, some single use plastics are going to blow away in the wind. Something shoddily made in the bottom of a pond is going to come apart and shed plastics, etc.

Lights help criminals see what they are doing.

In space though you can do extremely lightweight construction because structures don't need to support their weight against gravity unless they are huge enough that tidal forces matter.

Like O'Neill's research group killed off the plan with the big cylinders because you would construct solar power satellites out of plastic films with vapor deposited metal and semiconductors and these would be light enough to send up from Earth and assemble in space.

I'm going to take the opposite position that "focus mode" and other attempts that iOS makes to filter notifications are part of the problem and not part of the solution.

I was sick and tired of having notifications from the 2-factor auth program at worth not appearing or appearing and then disappearing before i could answer them. Of people calling and the phone never ringing. Of getting texts and never having the text appear, or rather some of the texts would appear on my iPhone and others would appear on my iPad.

Getting to the bottom of why my phone seemed to be possessed by the devil I did quite a few things but when it came to notifications:

(1) disable notifications from an app unless I really need them

(2) delete as many of the focus nodes I could so none of them could be engaged accidentally

(3) make notifications persistent all the time

(4) disable notification grouping

I see the harder the phone tries to filter things the more it loses notifications you want but of course, the way things work in real life, the unwanted notifications will always get through.

I've got really mixed feelings about Clojure. Like when I read Graham's book I went through a phase of "he wouldn't be fighting with nconc if he was using Clojure!" I find some algorithms to be easy and fun to write using persistent data structures and others maddening though if I did it more I'd get better at it. zippers are weirdly unergonomic because of some little bad choices. I badly wanted to do a project with the Clara rules engine but never got the chance.

As for GNU emacs I got over it. Like I was introduced to it in 1989, it was the cool new editor for the Unix world, one of my friends loved scripting with it. However I experienced it getting really janky about 20 years before other software got janky and I don't know why. Some of it might have been rot in things it depends on, like it used to be curses apps actually worked right but now they suffer data corruption from the telnet/ssh connection and always seem to have an off-by-one on the screen size. X Windows got glitchier. I guess emacs was ahead of its time, now people write janky apps with Electron -- like I have to type R E A L L Y : S L O W L Y when I use Slack at work. Photoshop is like that too, computers are 100x's of times faster so Photoshop should boot up faster than Momo Chiyoda can transform but no, it doesn't.

I switched to vim around 2003 as my emergency Unix editor because I could log into a busted system and start working and not have to rely on the package system (often the thing that was busted) to install emacs or build it from scratch. Helps that it doesn't use continuation characters so cut and past just works, there are lots of little things that make vim live more comfortably side by side with modern GUI life than emacs does.

(1) SBCL is fine in terms of speed so far as I am concerned. But wherever you have software engineering in the large, especially involving C++, you have 40 minute builds and a split between smart people who think that's a problem and smart people who don't.

(2) The trouble with those balls-to-the-walls macros is that systems that use them tend to be "write only", like some guy writes 4000 lines of Lisp that do the work of 80,000 lines of C++ and then he moves on and there is never a version 2.0 but the system gets rewritten in C++, supposedly for performance, but really because they couldn't find anybody who could maintain it. It is really pleasing to see how little code is in Lisp systems from the golden age of AI but... when Yahoo! bought Graham's startup they kept the customers but threw away the code.

You are more likely to be sustainable if you get two people to write 12,000 lines in something like typescript or ML that uses Dragon Book technology to the same end.

Actually cringe and painful. One thing I don't appreciate about the Fedi is the people for whom technology politics conceals contempt for end users and once you get left of the Fedi it is 100% of the people.

it compiles to bytecode but the bytecode engine is not that fast.

i had a phase when I was using PyPi a lot for branchy "old AI" kinds of workloads and felt it was an easy win but since then it has been either numpy or PIL or pytorch doing the heavy lifting or scripty stuff like uploading files to S3 where performance doesn't matter a lot.

I will grant that Common Lisp can be compiled to run amazingly quickly!

I'm going to take the opposite position that there is much less special about Lisp than people think. Like I have met so many programmers that travel around like itinerant martial artists looking for true functional programming and they never find it.

To be specific, you can work all of the examples in Graham's On Lisp in Python except for one of the last chapters where he implements continuations that really need macros -- but this is basically the async/await facility that Python already has. The other examples use macros for performance but work fine with just plain functional programming.

React with hooks is an example of that kind of system at work -- the JSX transformation is a very simple shim you can put in front of the JS compiler and the hooks themselves are the kind of trick that On Lisp teaches you how to do.

On Lisp doesn't use the kind of tree-walking macros that really are unique to Lisp. And... the techniques in the Dragon Book for writing compilers are the real magic. If looking to Lisp as an old shiny keeps you from learning how to write compilers, it is holding you back.

I think the homoiconic thing leads people astray. There's a real tension that, for performance reasons, mainstream compilers aren't extensible, for instance you might want to write a

  unless(X) {...} => if(!X) {...}

Many things hold us back.

The industry has been so traumzatized by slow compiles that trading speed for extensibility doesn't sell to the people who create languages. Also once you have the sophistication to make things like parser generators you know how to get things done with the terribly unergonomic parser generators we have and don't have a lot of empathy for all the programmers out there who might be using parser generators if any of them were built as if usability matters.

When they say products like that are "compostable" they mean in a large scale commercial facility that attains a pretty high temperature, not the back yard compost pile.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259033222...

I like "everything is public"; I mean, 95% of the DM's I get on various social platforms are something like the guy who wants me to make NFTs of my photos (at my expense) or some large-chested woman who says "Hi!" first thing and doesn't show any sign that they looked at my profile in which case it would be "Hi foxy" or something.

He comes and goes as he pleases but is usually pretty open about it. Also he has plenty of space to do construction projects he wants, he'd probably like to keep playing guitar past 11pm but there are limits!

Now it is not a good situation for sex for anyone involved but we have a lot of land so there's nothing better than a love nest made from glamping gear at least in the summer.

Well high wage implies a cost that has to be pushed on somewhere. It's not crazy to fear that raising wages, sometimes, can cause costs to go up, which can lead to more demand for higher wages. It may really depend on how much slack there is in the system.

What does improve material standard of living is increases in productivity, but the scope for those is limited, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

Like the basic story of the past 150 or so years is that agriculture has gotten dramatically more productive so people can do other things and move into cities with all sorts of implications.

He's paying a fraction of market rate rent and has saved a lot of money.

He's eating food out of the communal pool and it's a running gag at local restaurants that he eats two entrees. I think it's fair that he contributes something, like he is working, except for this summer when he said "take this job and shove it" because he was working for a crew where the foreman was twice his age but didn't have any sense for construction. Instead, he's doing a lot of work around the farm to fix things up, some of which is stuff we need and some of which is stuff he wants.

He expects to inherit the farm, will probably move to our other house if and when he is ready to co-habitate as opposed to getting on the housing ladder in the conventional way.

It's an interesting question.

We have a group that promotes a "living wage" construct in Tompkins County that pushes the unquestioned assumption that people who are working in the lowest paying jobs can live 100% alone. It's not something I want to challenge directly, but... It reminds me of discussions about the minimum wage in the late 1980s when it was common for teenagers to work at supermarkets and fast food markets. I think the public never really understood how the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit

was specifically intended to help out people who were raising a family with low incomes that was economically efficient and how there is some logic to people who are working in low income jobs qualifying for food stamps, it is not just a way "Wal-Mart is stealing for us."

e.g. part of "affordability" is keeping costs low and as much leftie folks want to sweep it under the rug there is a lot of internal class conflict in groups such as women: like the Sheryl Sandberg type definitely benefits from exploiting less wealthy women to do child care work for them and child care is basically problematic because the child care worker is not productive enough to put their own children in child care without subsidy and you don't get the Fordist scenario where the auto line worker can easily afford to own one of the cars they make.

My 20-something son is living with us but he does pay (some) rent.

I half expect to have to apologize for this, like when I was growing up people would think you are a loser if you were in this situation. Today people think we are really smart and the people who are paying more rent than they can afford to live alone that are losing.

It's the spec. "It just doesn't work" whether or not the hardware or software is good quality.

I don't know about yours but anything I've seen that works has a limited number of plugs on it. Keyboard and mouse and a USB hard drive and the occasional thumb drive... You are fine. The 7-port hub is a bad smell, like you can't plug 7 devices into a USB 3.0 bus due to undocumented limits.

But if you have that AND a USB bluetooth dongle, a USB ethernet adapter, USB DAC with SPDIF output you run into the "USB-C is best effort at best when you plug in a lot of devices" problem... Which never gets talked about, though if you talk to Copilot or Gemini about it they will tell you don't waste your time with USB 3.

I haven't seen a USB 3.0 hub that I've liked, and I've paid top dollar.

USB 1.0 had a model where you really could enumerate 127 devices attached to a hub. The USB 3.0 makes no promises for what should be possible with hubs and if you actually try it you find that at some point plugging in a new device makes other devices drop out. Like I've never been able to plug 7 devices into a 7 port hub.

I asked Google's AI mode "a friend of mine likes "hey baby" by (deadmus/mellifresh) and wants to find similar tracks" and mainly suggested other deadmau5 and Melleefresh tracks (corrected our spelling) -- did recommended "Internet Friends" by Knife Part and "Exceeder" by Mason. I thought the first was a direct hit, the second is a little different but "sick" in a good way... It starts a little slow but the groove gets great once I get in.

I talked about this with Microsoft Copilot and it said that it works like a mirror of your patterns so if you are a senior dev and have good conversations about code it will have good conversations about code, if you are confused it will be confused. Like I think in words like "self-object" and "egregore" and I don't need to explain them to LLMs, they just talk like that. If you had a different vocabulary they would use that.

The times when AI models seem to be disobeying me are when I don't understand the problem and I am writing prompts that don't really make sense and instead of confronting me about it it goes along and acts confused. I think a lot of people who struggle don't know how to code, don't understand the subject matter and don't think clearly and most of all don't know what a good answer looks like.

I regularly write a paragraph about my understanding of the situation, concerns I have, say "there is some code over there which is an example of how we do this" and then end with "does this make sense? do you have any questions for me?" and then go back and forth a few times and it especially does well in handling those corner cases, like it will ask about problems that were on my mind and that I didn't get in the prompt and it will also tell me about problems I wasn't thinking of.

There are many different "algorithms". YouTube has an algorithm that gets a very high hit rate because it plays music you've already proven that you like. That's good and bad.

I listen to the "Deep Cuts" recommender on Plexamp a lot, it uncovers a lot of good music that I haven't heard before out of my large collection, I've got no idea how it works.

One funny thing about it is that I do not play it through the speakers at home because my family tends to find anything selected by a recommender really provocative, not necessarily in a bad way, but the last thing I want to do is answer questions about music I didn't select myself. I mean I can play through a Charlie XCX or Tyler the Creator or rock-opera phase Kinks album and nobody says anything about it but if they do I have a good story to tell about it, but it's too annoying to get hassled about some UB40 track I never heard before that's between a BTO and Olivia Newton-John track.

(Generally I find that recommender selected content is "provocative", like if anyone is looking over my shoulder, they are very unlikely to see what I am actually interested in and working on but instead they want to ask me questions about things on my screen that I'm either just a little warm or totally cold to)