HN user
Piling on a moment to write to a real hero...
In the 1980s/1990s I was a VAX/VMS person and your book was a hit in our LUG because it included REAL DCL CODE.
I've frequently quoted your "if it isn't logged, it didn't happen".
Thank you.
I melt milk jugs and other HDPE plastics into musical claves and drum sticks as an answer to "recycling plastic is kind of bs". It melts at 350 degrees and can be done in a toaster oven in the garage or even the kitchen with proper ventilation. The smell isn't that bad, nothing like if you dropped plastic in a fire.
I've also made some sticks from braiding plastic grocery bags which are also often made of HDPE (#2) type plastic.
Tried again and it's showing my state. Thank you for looking.
I'm getting only Wisconsin no matter what state I choose. I have not created an account yet, would that make it actually work?
I like the idea, and I would like to use it. It still requres me to be conscious enough to add a new tool to it.
I'd love to see something like a "discover" option that attempts to scan what things I have added to assist me in building the make for the next time.
It's worth mentioning here that a lot of people who HAVEN'T lost their jobs are taking pay cuts just because cost of living increases aren't always there. If you're a contractor, often the contract is just extended and doesn't take into account the macro issues we're all seeing.
I won't live long enough to care, but it seems like we are setting up for a Y2100 problem. The Y2k issue was understandable and justifiable - when a lot of the systems were built, the dominant carrier of data was an 80 column punch card or card image. Two digits was VERY expensive.
It seems we have fallen into the habit of doing 2 digit years again in a lot of cases and there isn't an architectural reason for it. Am I the only one seeing this?
reminds me that my first taste of the internet was the days where you pretty much had t have a university account. I used a friend's, and was blown away by what I found on Usenet
I got the black Kickstarter-only version. I got interested in coding in C again. My (now) ex broke up with me over this thing on the mistaken notion that I was messing with her somehow electronically. I got told i had to leave. Tonight. And take all my electronics with me. She cited having her "black hat friend" looking into it and he said it was pretty evil. I am sure she is reading the recent news with some level of satisfaction.
I bought another a couple months later and if I can get over my ADHD, I still hope to make the radio chat useful.
Born in 1961 and these articles don't touch on one thing that I remember when I was a kid: you only needed 5 numbers to dial if you were calling someone else in the same thing. This was the case at my grandparents in Bay City, Michigan in the late 1960s. My cousin's number was LIncoln 2-9729
I have never understood how that worked despite my father working for the phone company. Dad explained a lot of things, but that wasn't one of them.
It's arguable that today the "friction" might be a feature.
a couple years after AOL came online and... well changed it quite a bit.
Hey what if we sent ai bots to talk to each other on Usenet?
I also came to the same realization about the same age a few years ago.
There is an article making the rounds that refers to a mathematical proof of shoelace tying last couple weeks that talks about this (https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/math-tie-shoes-corre...)
I tried the Ian way once, but didn't like it, but once i figured out that i was grannying my shoes all my life and fixed it, I don't have to tie the loops together like i did all my life.
I have one of these stuck on my phone that I listen to occasionally and I giggle a lot when they mention their lifestyle consultant Martha Stewart.
Example of this is that one of these recordings, listed as "Kmart 1973 Reel To Reel" has an address of 3020 East Grand Blvd in Detroit. Motown's original studio was on West Grand Blvd. It's intriguing to consider who the voice talent was, and what if any crossover there was during those days.
Googling the address shows that the former recording studio is now a residence.
I worked for Oracle in their Broomfield, Colorado campus. There was an alcove off a hallway that had bookshelves and a library that had been apparently inherited from StorageTek, an acquisition of Sun Microsystems before Sun was in turn bought by Oracle. It was a fascinating snapshot of mid-90s (mostly) tech books, but there were some interesting cultural books including African American studies. Basic HTML books, several O'Reilly books with the bear postcard in them still (I stole one =) ) but the best one for me was a book about OpenVMS Digital Command Language, on which I cut my teeth in the 1980s. It was a favorite place for me to spend a few minutes after lunch in the cafeteria on my way back to my desk.
I currently work for Western Digital and recently someone put a bunch of tech books out on a credenza in one of the collaboration areas with a note inviting people to borrow them. Not exactly a library, but it reminded me of the nostalgia people are expressing here about the big batches of books we used to lug around from cubicle to cubicle (often using an office chair).
same with New York Times... and Wall Street Journal... and Financial Times... and The Economist... and many others. I've wondered what it would take to pre-emptively edit HN so i don't even see those links.
"tech work" is more than just programmers. Highly paid programmers might not be the initial target market, but roles like front line tech support, quality assurance roles would benefit from collectively pushing back on management initiatives like surveillance etc. Many times these jobs are deeply ingrained in a bespoke system that doesn't necessarily translate to another position.
When I worked at a UAW shop (GM) in the 1980s, there were salaried engineers and union hourly people building the cars. When the union made a gain by way of a strike, it was automatically applied to the salaried folks. We understood that their work benefitted the rest. This started to break down when GM bought EDS in 1985 and transferred all their IT people over to it and they lost all of those benefits. People who were able to get themselves classed as "engineers" rather than data processing were able to avoid the big transfer.
a lot of the skills that one needs for a job that we're arguing is beyond the AIs, like software architect or writing anything with real thought in it, implies that we humans are smarter and we can just do the more interesting writing. How does one become a good writer? By writing a lot of stuff at a lower level. I am concerned that by putting all of the grunt work on the AIs will remove the training opportunities that the humans need to actually do the higher level stuff. Removing a few rungs at the bottom of the ladder of becoming better at your career.
I became concerned at this after reading an article a while back that talked about how some sports writing has been automated for years (how hard is it to write that this team won, the other lost and the score was blah) but that work was needed for writers to get to the next level.
A similar thing could be said about technical support folks. The AI can handle the easy ones, but without the easy ones, how do we bring up a new tech to level 2 if level 1 doesnt exist any more? Also, there are a lot more level 1 techs than level 2.
Tying my shoes: My knots would always come out, so i got into the habit of tying the loops together. A few years ago, in my mid 50's I realized that I was tying a granny not rather than a square not. I made the adjustment and have never tied my loops together again.
I think i was 40 years into my usage of vi when i learned that ZQ was a thing. I bet someone else learns it right here.
followed, perhaps, by Benny Hill.
laser holes.
So far I am skeptical. It can do some things, but it is not beyond bullshitting.
I went to a PC expo of some sort in NYC in 1999 because I was in town for an interview. LCDs had just come out, but every exhibit in the hall had them because they were new but also because you could ship a whole bunch of flat screens in the same weight as a decent CRT.
In 1992 VAX/VMS from Digital Equipment Corporation was beginning to feel the hurt from various Unix systems that were becoming popular. In 1993, I worked at a US Army contract that still had MS-DOS and we had to do some creative accounting things to get them some systems that could run Windows 3.11.
There were still a bunch of proprietary systems like Apollo that had were used in a lot of engineering places. Unix came in two flavors, BSD System V and Berkeley. Linux hadn't happened yet but open source had made its presence known by all the utilities that ran under Unix with familiar names prefixed by a g- like gawk, gcc, gtar, etc. Before the GNU project, each vendor had their own C compiler that came with their version of Unix. The GNU utilities slowly made those obsolete as gcc became the standard C compiler.
Brian Eno started his [ambient] career doing essentially that, creating and tweaking programming systems to do various musical things, and then letting them to go do their thing. Does this make his ambient pieces, many of which started as a programmatic system, not art? If not, where does the line fall?
I tried to use a CPAP 15 years ago but it didn't work for me because of the noise and the fact that I had long hair and it felt like i was trapped in it and it was difficult to get it all right so i felt comfortable going to sleep.
a few years ago I got another one, and didn't like it at first. Turned out that I needed the mask that covers my nose and mouth because I am a mouth breather. Getting a different mask made a big difference.