isamuel

You can be a member of a labor union without that union being recognized as your exclusive bargaining representative for a certain employer (or whatever unit).

I’m curious (as a recovered alcoholic myself) how you got sober.

Very weird that clandestine imperial gophers start to feel anxious and have trouble sleeping after a while. must be a secret laser

Amodei’s use of “warfighters” (a Hegseth-era neologism for “soldiers”) is truly nauseating.

Public sector unions can’t do the thing you’re describing.

I also remember this, and in fact I found an old Dilbert newsletter from 1996 ("Dogbert's New Ruling Class") where he describes it:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdb/1996Mar/0000.ht...

The simplest objection I can see is orbital mechanics.

There is a great deal of orientalism --- it is genuinely unthinkable to a lot of American tech dullards that the Chinese could be better at anything requiring what they think of as "intelligence." Aren't they Communist? Backward? Don't they eat weird stuff at wet markets?

It reminds me, in an encouraging way, of the way that German military planners regarded the Soviet Union in the lead-up to Operation Barbarossa. The Slavs are an obviously inferior race; their Bolshevism dooms them; we have the will to power; we will succeed. Even now, when you ask questions like what you ask of that era, the answers you get are genuinely not better than "yes, this should have been obvious at the time if you were not completely blinded by ethnic and especially ideological prejudice."

And yes, ChatGPT is kinda like an addictive drug here. If someone "can't work without ChatGPT anymore", they're addicted and have lost the ability to work on their own as a result.

Come on, you can’t mean this in any kind of robust way. I can’t get my job done without a computer; am I an “addict” who has “lost the ability to work on my own?” Every tool tends to engender dependence, roughly in proportion to how much easier it makes the life of the user. That’s not a bad thing.

Totally understand. With any luck, you and I have played two sides of a dialogue that’ll be read by someone else, for whom it might be quite useful. For that I thank you.

It’s not the cues that get you. That is an idea promoted largely by treatment centers and the rehab industry, who need to be able to plausibly claim they are teaching their customers how to avoid relapse. I’m a recovered alcoholic and I can assure you, my “cue” for drinking was being alive and awake at the same time.

Your reaction is a sane and normal one: you remember a good time, and you have some inkling to recreate it. Certainly. And to most people that makes sense. But alcoholics are different from most people, and their understanding that is an essential first step to recovery.

For reasons of personal history, stimulant medications like Adderall are a hard no for me. I am curious, though, about non-stimulant options like atomoxetine, if anyone has views.

I started reading DF when I was a college student, probably in 2002 or 2003. I listened to every iteration of The Talk Show that I can remember --- both runs with your former host, and the current edition from the very first episode. When I moved to Los Angeles and had no friends and felt lonely as hell all the time, I used to put on the keyboard episode of The Talk Show to give me something pleasant to fall asleep to.

But John, your cheerleading for Israel's genocide --- man. Way before the election of the current cheerleader-in-chief for that effort, you were ahead of the game.

You said that students who protested this genocide should be expelled from college (you've got a friend in the White House now, John!):

These students should be expelled from college, not placated.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/10/19/violence

And, most sickening of all, you cheered the indiscriminate pager attack that maimed children, which your friend in the White House has now got a golden pager memorializing:

This whole operation sounds like it would make for a great movie.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/09/17/israel-hezbolla...

I could go on, but the effect was heartbreaking. My old friend, the voice in my little Pasadena apartment all those years ago, clapping for the maiming of children and howling for the expulsion of students who disagree with him? Who was this guy? Who is this guy? Had I read him wrong the whole time? Had I changed --- would I have loved those blown-up Lebanese kids back in 2002, and now I'd gone soft? I don't know. But if I'd visited DF for the first time in 2003 and found content calling for the expulsion of Iraq War protesters, I don't think I'd have made a second visit.

At the end, there's one of the craziest Venn diagrams I've seen in a while. The diagram asserts that --- by definition --- you aren't good at your "mission," the world does not need your "profession," you can't be paid for your "passion," and you can't love your "vocation." Grim!

“No mention of openbsd on the internet is complete without a long thread about source control migration.” — tedu@

Well, I'm thirsty.

You sound like you satisfy at least one of the two usual criteria for addiction in the sense 12-step programs use the term. If you ever want someone to show you a program that might help you recover, just reply with your contact info and I’d be happy to help

Thank you. I was typing out a comment like this in frustrated response to a different remark elsewhere in the thread (“calories in, calories out!”) but stopped. I’m glad I did because you put what I was going to say much better than I would have. Also I learned the word “stoicimetric,” so thanks for that.

That was someone else.

Name collision researcher here!

This made me curious and I started doing research on other problematic name collisions. Did you know that Valve’s game distribution service has a name that’s already widely used in the scientific community for the gaseous form of heated water? It looks like steam has been around for several centuries at least so Valve really ought to have known better.

Anyway, if you’re interested, I’m putting together a long investigation on whether Microsoft’s flagship operating system is in collision with a very common term used in the construction and glass industry. Hope to have it done soon

I don't know enough about the economics of freight shipping to have an opinion on whether airships make economic sense for that. But for passenger travel, I can imagine a high-end market for the wealthy. Don't think "cruise ships" — think "yachts."

“Ah! Well. Nevertheless,”

It’s all over, fat man.

You’ll be missed.

Spare me the snotty tone. I was asking a question in good faith and still am. Read what I wrote: I know what hyperfocus is and I chose the verb I chose deliberately.

Can you explain your footnote? I do not agree. Someone I love is autistic, and it actually sounds exactly backward to me: the ability to command sustained attention is something she enjoys in remarkable surplus, for example.

Law is like a border after a war: a description of where it was that conflicting forces could not advance without retreating somewhere else that mattered more. It is history, not code: it describes where the last conflict ended.

Which by the way, I mean: I agree with you

Why stop there? Maybe websites you don’t like should have a crowdsourced assassin come to kill the relevant developers.

When I was a little boy, Logo is how my grandfather taught me to program. He had an Amstrad computer that he used to keep the books of his insurance business, and when I was three years old or so, he noticed my interest in the machine and set about to teach me.

The Amstrad used standard 5 1/4” inch floppies and had (if I recall) two such drives; he showed me how to put the correct disk in and close the latch, and boot the computer. (Important: which side goes up.) And he taught me some very basic commands for the cursor, the “turtle”: up down, forward, turning, etc. My first lesson in degrees. He tried to explain subroutines but I couldn’t quite get it at that age.

Well, I thought it was cool, and played for a long afternoon by myself. When he came to check on me, he found that I’d gone into a room near his office to play with my toys very quietly. He asked: Oh, did you not like playing with the computer? And I said nothing. Very quiet. And he said, what happened?

I said, a red light came on and it broke. :(

The Amstrad’s Caps Lock key had a red light when activated. The case sensitive Logo language thereby ceased working and the characters all looked different to me. So, evidently, I ran away, thinking I had broken my grandfather’s important work machine.

Barely containing his laughter, I am sure, he escorted me back into his office and explained what had happened. He regaled me with the story for the rest of his life; when he died a few years ago, it leapt to my mind. Some years later I would end up with a B.S. in computer science and it is hard to see how it would have been so but for his decision to teach a three year old boy Logo.

In conclusion, Logo—and grandfathers—kick ass.

“Third pounder” is also a bad name. “Quarter pounder” has a pleasing rhythm and rhyme to it; “third pounder” doesn’t. “Third” is also easily scanned as “first, second, third,” which “quarter” is not.

Should have called it the “pebble pounder” (0.02 stone—sure, it doesn’t make sense really, but it sounds nice, doesn’t it?) Or the “fifteen’r” (150 grams is about a third of a pound).

That is an admirably charitable response to a comment that I could not truthfully characterize the same way. Good job by you.

Let’s go ahead and caption this comment “On The Cusp of a Revelation (2021)”