aristus

They literally didn't have a Lunh check digit? Like, 1960s math? My gobs are smacked.

Mocking the signs at Facebook started literally the day after they appeared suddenly in the 1601 building. "Break fast and eat things", and so on. There was a very fancy print shop on site and we would work up spoofs on the same equipment.

A large percentage of programmers of a certain generation got their start in the graphic design world.

In the early 2000s, back at the beginning of the world, Yahoo's web code used ^A and ^B for field and record separators to avoid having to escape commas and quotes and newlines. That was probably the last time I ever saw ASCII control characters used as intended in the wild.

There is no technical reason why CSV should have won out, except that keyboards have a comma key and almost never a ^A key.

Yes, literally. Same argument applies to limited copyright terms. Though I'd say it would be with less concern, not completely without it.

You can like the work but hate the jerk. The real question comes when you decide whether to financially support a jerk's work.

Another n=1, but it depends. Outside interruptions when I'm on a tear are horrible. I don't often distract myself with a full-featured computer. In fact I often spin off into "research" or fiddling with fonts as a way to let my background brain do its work. I do a fair amount of editing on my phone (!) when on transit or generally goofing off.

Browser DOM Security Mechanism.

A SIM card is an often-overlooked "what you have" second factor, yes leaving aside phone company social engineering hacks.

I made the mistake of buying an iphone on a trip to US, which is eSIM only. The tech works fine --Google Fi is a pretty good example-- but I later traded that phone for the exact same "international" model, traded even plus cash, to get my slot back.

There was no pipe, as such. Just a wide deep long trench full of rocks.

100 years on, everyone involved was dead. Happens a lot in old neighborhoods.

Oh, yes. No lawns in that neighborhood but I thought hard about what might be going into the fruits. Years on, no ill effects.

I discovered French drains while trying to dig a hole for a fruit tree a while back. The land was on a hill and about 30cm down I hit this huge pile of dirty gravel. Ok, so maybe someone filled that spot with gravel. Sunk another hole a bit farther down. More gravel, etc. It took me longer than i'd like to admit to figure it out.

Turns out it was the main drainage for the whole neighborhood. Heh. Moved my tree to the side and it thrived on all that lovely water.

You mean, Yet Another Human-Organized Ontology?

About ten years ago I got my hands on some of the last production FusionIO SLC cards for benchmarking. The software was an in-memory database that a customer wanted to use with expanded capacity. I literally just used the fusion cards as swap.

After a few minutes of loading data, the kernel calmed down and it worked like a champ. Millions of transactions per second across billions of records, on a $500 computer... and a card that cost more than my car.

Definitely wouldn't do it that way these days, but it was an impressive bit of kit.

Try "the music of the spheres". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_universalis

30 years is a lot of time. I agree with GP. Starting back then would have been best; starting now would be second. I live in a country that has twice the number of medical school graduates per 100k population than the US, and unsurprisingly compared to the US it's easier to get general medical and specialist attention.

Ah, you're right. They announced they would but Congress didn't act.

https://catalog.usmint.gov/proof-set-2024-24RG.html?cgid=ann...

The US stopped minting pennies last year.

Note: This applies only to traditional "harvest" surgery and not the new aphereisis method used today.

The surgery itself wasn't great but I was at 80% after a month and 100% after three. No long term effects.

Here's the thing: at every point in the process, interviews, blood tests, health checks, etc, at every point the entire process is explained very carefully and you are told at every point that it is voluntary and you can back out right up the the minute of surgery.

Except. The recipient has their marrow irradiated and killed a week before you show up to donate. So you better make that appointment. Of course all voluntary. It was a real mindfuck of a whipsaw of emotions going in, and then months of zero information after.

It's hard to explain the feeling of holding another anonymous kid's life in your hands. I'd cry for a week every year around that time, and then the survey phone call.

The story worked out for us. I got to meet him a couple years later and was just invited to his wedding.

I was part of a study of bone marrow donors. Basically a short phone call every year. The questions were solely about physical effects, but each time I tried to explain psychological effects similar to PTSD. I have heard similar stories from other donors. The grad students on the phone were sympathetic but as far as I can tell there was no way to push that information up the chain. They had a checklist and that was it.

Something that's kinda funny but baffling to me is the unspoken assumption that a UI with voice input should also default to voice output.

That's not how two humans work on command / response tasks, say, hanging pictures. You say, "a finger to the left and up" and I move the picture. Silent UI feedback is a curiously unplumbed idea.

Or another one: if you sit at a restaurant and ask the menu, would you rather they tediously recite it? Or hand you a paper menu while maybe giving a couple tips like "the fish pasta is awesome today"?

You might be surprised. I spent a long time carefully and politely explaining to an immigration case officer that "Firstname NMN Lastname" meant, in fact, that there was No Middle Name and not that there was a middle name cryptically encoded as NMN.

Yes. Thank you for reading. :) It's aged a bit but I am working on an update for the cloud era: https://carlos.bueno.org/2023/03/aws-dismal-guide.html

In my profile, but https://carlos.bueno.org . I also write kids books on computer science and that seems to hook some parents. ;)

I made a hobby of writing intro posts on deep technical topics, from DNS to concurrency to cutting cloud cost. From 2009 ish onwards all my gigs have been at least helped if not initiated by someone reading a post and saying "we should talk to this guy".

Not a magic spell. I had been writing for almost ten years prior before anyone noticed, and only a fraction get any play.

As I understand it, it was not literally the last thing holding back. But NASA worries about everything and we have centuries of examples of remote missions failing because of medical problems that could not be solved in the field. Billions of dollars, tens of years, and a ship full of lives can't be risked on a 3mm pebble if it can possibly be prevented.

Congrats! How old is your kid? ;)

The main sticking point why trad cashflow factors don't do this is probably a lack of a good company credit score system + mechanisms for enforcement.

I've had clients ask whether they can pay large (7 figure!) invoices on credit. Ah... nope. :)

Don't forget the copper refinery next door. :/

IIRC this started in the Mac finder with OSX 10.2. It bled onto the web a few years later with the advent of UI frameworks and blog feeds.