jcd748

I think we agree. I hate it, and I can't stop it, but also I definitely won't participate in it.

Life is short and I like creating things. AI is not part of how I write, or code, or make pixel art, or compose. It's very important to me that whatever I make represents some sort of creative impulse or want, and is reflective of me as a person and my life and experiences to that point.

If other people want to hit enter, watch as reams of text are generated, and then slap their name on it, I can't stop them. But deep inside they know their creative lives are shallow and I'll never know the same.

I remember we had an Epson colour printer that we got just after we got married: it was able to print photos, and this was a great feature, except that this would run through ink like nothing else, and ink, well, you know.

When it eventually died I got a wired Brother B&W laser printer, and it's been incredible. We've put many thousands of pages through it, easily, changed the toner twice, and it just keeps on working. It is a simple, boring, wonderful piece of tech.

I guess it depends what you mean by "working".

In addition to being a software developer (my day job), I also write and publish poetry, reviews, and non-fiction. These pay very little, if anything; I find that US literary publications pay almost nothing, while Canadian ones are usually able to pay a little. I think this is due to Canada Council rules around funding, but may be wrong.

Regardless, it's a field where it's very difficult to make money, and most of the people I know who manage this full-time do some combination of traditional teaching at colleges/universities or via online courses, manuscript editing services, that sort of thing.

As much as I'd like to be able to spend more time on my artistic pursuits, I'm grateful that my day job allows me to do things like pay my mortgage, and eat, and so likely the arts will stay a side thing with me forever.

You're thinking of Slack. Slackware has been around since the very early days of Linux.

Should have been a .nu domain!

That was how I did it, too. Monthly, I'd archive posts, to allow archive perusal by months. I wasn't tied to any particular software. I got hosting with friends who set up their own blogs at their own domains. All of us were in or just out of high school, no real plans for the future, lots of free time to post and talk over AIM/MSN.

In retrospect it was primitive, and it worked. There was a huge scene around all this - everyone had their blogs, and those with an eye for colour and design were doing cutting-edge presetation in idiosyncratic ways. I really miss this when taken against today's single-page, "FOL.IO IS A PLATFORM FOR MANAGING WORMS" type of web.

mc's online journal was what drew me into all of this. It's been offline for probably 20 years now, but it was deeply personal and intense, and wonderfully written.

I've had to get up very early to deal with production issues at work (sometimes between 2-3 a.m.), and I actually find those hours very peaceful - just the hum of the heating/AC and my dogs' snoring.

I run FreeBSD on my desktop, and I was surprised by how easy it was to get set up, and how quickly it detected everything.

In the late 90s, Sourceforge (and Freshmeat) were really good places to get software. But even in the early 00s, it felt dusty and dated.

To be fair, I had almost eight years of French in school (Canadian), and the best I can do now is read it semi-fluently.

Languages have to be used or they're lost. I spent a year learning to read Old English and got up to a decent proficiency; that's gone, now, too.

Dollars do not literally make the world go round. The world literally goes around because it was formed from a disc of swirling matter, and the lack of inertia and forces that would stop it.

I just finished Aurelius' "Meditations" last month - my family has a small, leatherbound copy that was a gift to my great-grandfather for Christmas, 1924. I found it particularly resonant, incredible for a text that's almost two thousands years old.

There was definitely a feel of do-it-yourself, especially when installing Linux meant either wiping a partition, or trying to resize an existing one with very primitive tools. I remember using a weird variant called DOSLinux for a while, because my 486 couldn't handle the "real" distros, and then getting a new 350MHz machine and getting RedHat 6 installed. Then realizing I could use X, spending endless hours on themes.net, tweaking WindowMaker and finding new themes, and doing the Web 1.0 by learning perl to write a simple blogging engine.

You're right, though. Different times, and the community feels very different. The feel I get when I'm browsing web forums for answers to questions is a lot of kids who use Linux because it's somehow "cool", and certainly it's ridiculously easy to install these days. But I might just be making assumptions based on the terrible grammar and incomplete sentences.

The iron ring is a Canadian engineering tradition. The original ones were made from iron from a bridge that collapsed and killed a lot of people. It's worn as a reminder of what a few miscalculations or oversights can do.

Xerox 8086 with QBasic for me. 640k RAM!

You probably don't need std::for_each anymore. With C++11, you can do the following:

for (const auto& element : collection) { }

What's wrong with <algorithm>? I use it all the time for sort, swap, and random_shuffle comes up more frequently than I expect.

Still heavily used in games and finance! Though, you're right about MFC.

A quote I've always liked, from "The Writing Life" by Annie Dillard:

"How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives."

I also do some Gosu coding, besides other stuff. You must also be a Guidewire user.

I used to have an HP with this problem as well. Eventually I managed to get my files off the computer, and then promptly bought a new, not-an-HP laptop. Never again.

It's a conspiracy theory to help out devs in Saskatchewan, Alaska, and Hawaii.

I'm originally from Saskatoon, and remember a day around 2004 or 2005 where it was in the -40s, -62 with the windchill. Once was enough - I can't imagine "more often than not"!

I had an HP laptop that I bought around 2009. It lasted a year before the insane heat issues started; I agree with you completely regarding the engineering issues. In the end, I ended up buying a Lenovo about two years ago, and it's been perfect for me.

Getting back to the original story, I don't think I've bought a desktop since 2003. I prefer using them, but laptops are just so convenient.

Me too. I use it daily, and am both amazed and confounded by it. Powerful and frustrating.

SAT is NP-complete, but there are certain properties that allow theorem provers to show that a particular instance is overconstrained (and therefore unsatisfiable), or underconstrained (and many solutions exist). It's at a particular point, so-called phase transitions, where one finds the very hard instances. As an example, when characterizing 3-SAT instances by grouping by their ratio of clauses to variables, the very hard instances are grouped around a value of ~4.3.

I'm torn, because while ESR did add a lot of emphasis on Unix/C culture (which is very important in hacker history), the last five or ten years he's really taken it off the rails, adding terms from war blogging and other sources that really have nothing to do with hacking at all.

I went from using a webapp exclusively for email, back to a traditional client. The reason was that the webapp didn't expose enough functionality, and I couldn't change the top-posting default value. Joining several email lists where bottom-posting was the norm, it made sense to adapt to that, and I ended up adopting Thunderbird. Prior to that, I hadn't used a "traditional" email client since pine and Pegasus Mail in the late 90s.

Absolutely. When I was first starting out, I made so many poor design and implementation choices. I like to think I've improved tremendously since then, and I've only done so by putting in thousands upon thousands of hours of programming.

Yes, I've always seen SAT as the canonical example given. Though, when I did some reading into phase transitions in NP-complete problems, 3-SAT was usually the example given (and used).