HN user
I'll just add...
Being able to eat pork without cooking it to death for fear of trichinosis is a recent development.
Also, the old movies where someone tries to commit suicide by sticking their head in an oven. That was coal gas and we don't heat homes with it anymore.
Here's a fun one, Benson and Hedges commissioned some classic 80's CGI, it got played at one of the art-house animation festivals that was a thing for nerds to do in the 80's. Looks like it was Robert Abel who did it.
But what was the point? It seemed like they were trying to sell gold collectibles to rich people in Malaysia.
A lot to unpack here. He espoused a worldview where human beings are "star stuff", a way for the Universe to be self-aware.
And this worldview does not exclude spiritual thinking, it just channels it in a specific direction.
Yes, he said our brains are made from the same matter as everything else, but it does not follow that he espoused any sort of strict materialism.
The truth is more subtle and nuanced than that.
If you are interested in getting inside his head, I recommend reading the Mr. X article.
Sagan made solid contributions to Planetary Science in the 60's and 70's.
His role as PBS educator, SF author, etc. needs to be considered as a separate thing.
I also loved James Burke and his Connections series, but as it got into the later seasons the so-called "connections" got tenuous and sometimes quite strained.
You can go through all the classic PBS science shows and find problems, Stephen Hawking's Universe was basically unwatchable because they refused to engage with the math.
Sorry pal, you're alone on that hill.
No, he's absolutely not.
It's done that way because of pre-visualization or Previs, which has been the norm for over a decade now.
I used to work in my mom and dad's print shop when I was a kid. 6 picas in an inch, 12 points in a pica, and by the time you go home your hands smell like hypo. That should give you an idea of how old I am.
For a kid I was passably good at setting up headlines for paste-up, but I never had to be the one who used an X-Acto Knife.
I'll die on the hill where 2K is better than 4K if your livelihood depends on having to stare at a screen at a distance of 60cm for upwards of 10 hours a day, longer sometimes.
I also think you missed my point about about the anti-aliasing. For various reasons I still use Windows and some of my favorite monospace fonts only exist in the the .FON format. I can emulate the X-Windows experience of using the misc-fixed-medium family and it works just fine for my needs.
I've tried most of the fonts here, but none of them really do it for me: https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads
But if you want to keep going on with the pedantry, have at it. Were you around in the Usenet days?
Emacs user. And the fonts I use have to work with anti-aliasing turned off.
Right now I'm using a Dell/Alienware AW3225DM and it's perfect for my needs (work + occasional gaming, and most of my gaming is retro). Best Buy was discounting these during the Xmas season.
I do not want anything higher than 2560x1440 because it makes my fonts look tiny, or I have to turn anti-aliasing on. Neither option is OK with me.
It's debatable whether it was first recorded in '63 or '64.
The genesis of Guaraldi's involvement was a 1963 documentary "A Boy Named Charlie Brown" which has nothing to do with the 1969 animated feature.
This was produced for TV but never aired, and recently surfaced on Youtube: https://youtu.be/UGAs5fZUvBM&t=425s
To complicate things further, Guaraldi released "Jazz Impressions of A Boy Named Charlie Brown" (once again, based on the 1963 documentary) but these recordings are not the same as the cues used in the documentary.
Once you develop an awareness of how SF screenplay writers do this, you can't unsee it.
Babylon 5 was particularly egregious, I was never a fan but I was puzzled that JMS had to do rely on it so heavily. It was like he created the character of Delenn just to be an exposition dumper and Mira Furlan faithfully did what was asked of her. Screenwriters also call this diegesis if the writer goes all the way and uses dialog to explicitly feed the narrative to the audience.
If you go back and watch the first two seasons of HBO's Westworld, you will see Anthony Hopkins' character repeatedly doing exposition dumps out of his mouth. The difference is in how he does it, that he is in such complete command of his craft that he can work out exactly what the screenwriters intended without drawing any attention to it.
And Trekkies will remember the time Larry Niven wrote a screenplay for TAS and gave all the exposition dumps to Leonard Nimoy. See how nicely he handles it?
More likely to get hit with a Zero Tolerance punishment for a single isolated incident, which derails your entire trajectory through the school system.
https://www.reddit.com/r/lansing/comments/1no5rtl/lansing_pa...
If you don't like the word Genocide you can call it Demographic Engineering, but the fact that it is happening is beyond debate.
I've always felt like tech workers view themselves as a modern-day petite-bourgeoisie, and this is why the industry has been so successful at keeping out the unions.
As an aside, I had friends who had to declare bankruptcy during DotCom 1.0 because of stock options and the Alternative Minimum Tax. This could have been fixed with legislation but it always seemed like the DC inside-the-beltway crowd saw the whole thing as class treachery and refused to intervene.
If you're talking about the ones who drove supply trucks during the war years, the hardest working men were women.
https://vietnamnews.vn/sunday/features/947180/female-drivers...
Ironically, I would far prefer the Douglas Adams idea of "Genuine People Personalities" over the current status quo.
If the self checkout scanner at the supermarket started bickering with me for entering the wrong produce code, that would wrap up the whole Turing Test thing for me.
Begging the Question.
Step 1: Assume your claim is already true, e.g. "Microsoft is a still good corporate actor in spite of doing X".
Step 2: Manufacture circular logic to support your claim from Step 1.
In other words, the poster is begging the question to be self-evident, rather than producing evidence to support their claim.
Thanks but no, everyone who came up in that era knew about K&P (K&R was the C book). The main publishers back then were O'Reilly, SAMS, QUE and a few others. I think it was a SAMS book but I'm not sure.
A more likely candidate is the Kochan book but the original 1985 first edition. It had the scrappy sense of humor that characterized the Unix culture in the 80's.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/293206.UNIX_Shell_Progra...
OK I have a question. I've been trying to track down a Unix book that was similar from that time period, covering command-line tools and shell programming. It had some funny cartoons in between the text. One particular cartoon featured a man who had spent too much time at the command line and was using single-word commands for everything, e.g. when he needed to send a letter he would point to it and say "MAIL" and when someone knocked on his door he would point to it and say "ENTER". Does anyone else remember that one?
It's turned into a generic term that usually means the ability to remove all corporate branding from the UI. A lot of it is in the ability to apply themes. For example the Icon style for Android 6 (Marshmallow) is now considered retro.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Marshmallow#/media/Fil...
I particularly despise the way Samsung wants to use impose a "bulging squircle" icon shape and I always find a way to override that (Nova Launcher still works well for this use case).
I went through the same process as a former Pixel 5 user.
Ended up with Galaxy S25 which weighs around 165g.
I pretty much hate Samsung for the One UI interface taking away the stock Android experience. If I could turn it all off I'd do it in a heartbeat.
But I put up with it because there is no other Android phone in 2025 that meets all the checkboxes (less than ~180g, supports all the current LTE and 5G comms, supported by the vendor).
Monty Python did a skit about it, along with a Terry Gilliam animated bit.
It's very close to Apollo 11 but the match is not precise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUQgBPjGmAQ#t=35
AFIAK no one has ever done an exhaustive analysis of the provenance of all that stock footage.
This is an example of someone chasing it down. I don't think it's been done for all the Saturn V launches (Apollo 4 thru the last Skylab launch). That would be a big ask.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBITROWVcok
As a kid growing up in the 70's it was perfectly normal to see a documentary about Apollo 11 where they throw in the Apollo 4 Stage 2 ring separation like it was no big deal. The awareness of all these subtle differences is a recent development.
NY Times did a similar piece in 2019.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8bMLcCxxAA
I'm not into Hip-Hop as a cultural thing but I love the way Mona aka "Sad Girl" does her linguistic code-switching, there's something intoxicating about it.
The recent PBS Frontline on the Jack Teixeira / Discord leaks provides an excellent primer on how classified systems work these days.
I agree, but it represents a cavalier attitude, because the worst-case is you get fired.
If you know some other company will take you in, or you have "fuck you money", that's great, but it represents a culture of privilege that very few people have these days.
Tears of sorrow running deep
Running silent in my sleep
-- Joan Baez
The concept of a mission / vision statement is an artifact of 1980's "Management Consulting" culture in the US, which had ties to the various "Human Potential" groups like est, Landmark Forum, etc.
Other things like 360 degree feedback are also borrowed from that culture.
There was a very old article in Fortune about this, it's preserved but there is no formatting.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240415121234/https://money.cnn...
With all due respect, I think you are falling into the nostalgia trap. MacWrite was never a true WYSIWYG editor because of the way it relied on Quickdraw for the on-screen rendering but the big deal at the time was the Laserwriter being the first Postscript printer (Adobe still had a proprietary lock on Postscript which lasted until around the end of the 80's). In 1985 Steve Jobs left Apple and started NeXT. One of their first products was the WriteNow word processor which was ported back to the Mac platform by a company called T/Maker (the Silicon Valley rumor mill of the time was that Steve Jobs and Heidi Roizen were an item for a while). WriteNow was the first one to offer a polished experience with proper font rendering and kerning that didn't look rasterized. God forbid you tried to print from MacWrite with font smoothing turned on, a one-page print job could take several minutes to render because of how the Laserwriter had to execute all that Postscript code in real-time.
That historic moment has been dramatized at least once.