smackeyacky

The technique of putting machine code behind a REM was common in the Microbee (another Z80 machine). Often used for sound effects in games as the standard PLAY basic statement only did tones.

He set the style of being confidently incorrect. At least he was entertaining.

LG monitors not TVs

Entra is their lock in. They have little need for office other than customers expect it but if you look at the direction where they wholesale throw out Outlook for it’s worse web version you can see where they are headed

I don’t think it matters in a practical sense. Our streaming overlords have already shown that by crippling the effective color space of supposedly 4K video they care little for quality of broadcast. Crushed blacks and smeared video are all you’ll get no matter what the standards say. They were, are and remain terrible on 1080 video, 4K is a farce.

There are other solutions that require mass coordination and possible violence that would be a lot easier than gambling on phytoplankton

I haven’t used print for debugging for ages. Now it’s all trace on azure and hope your bug ends up in the sampled data in whatever that stupid thing is called. App insights or some rubbish. Apparently a good old log file just isn’t good enough it has to be larded up with a query language. Grep was fine guys.

I think I’d like to see a site where people posted their chat results that ended in a successful resolution. Just for isolated bugs or library use questions. Would not be useful for a lot of the internal work I do but maybe saving those internally would be useful inside a company

The heart of the mighty Australian Microbee. I still have the Rodney Zak’s book somewhere although I’ll admit doing anything fancy with assembler back then was a bit beyond me

My account is only there so nobody is tempted to squat there on my behalf. Perhaps a minor issue overall but worth considering

I think it was clear that the poster was distracted by all the useless bongs and beeps and that was what caused the extra distracted driving bong or beep

Communist Sydney trains are awful too

This is something git shares with pretty much every source code management system. Of the ones I’ve used over the years including SVN, PVCS, whatever that janky little Microsoft one was called and even sccs in the old days, they all sucked one way or another.

The only one that was truly intuitive to me was Envy/Developer. It only really made sense because we used it in Smalltalk but I really liked the packaged nature of change sets that it modeled.

Git is nowhere near the worst of these. SVN, hands down a cranky and unreliable dumpster fire was the worst.

With git at least you can get way with using a surprisingly small subset of features if you regularly merge before doing your pull request.

Time window is roughly to a non US citizen from when civil rights and women’s rights were ascending there. The last 20 odd years show a marked decline in both. I often wonder when segregation in the US will be introduced.

It is easy to forget US history as the vast majority of us have only been exposed to the 1960s to 2000s era which in retrospect seem like an anomaly.

I think it’s the demographic that has changed most markedly but even then discourse still rhymed with today’s dumpster fire. Sure, that monoculture of geeks had a veneer of community but that’s all it was.

Spam and bots showed up early enough I remember having to deal with garbage in email and Usenet. Even if it started with harmless crap like sending Marty Shergold style email forwards and whatnot. It was no paradise although admittedly it seemed to degrade fast from the early nineties.

I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars. I don’t think it’s worse now it’s just the volume got louder and things like reddit amplifying stupid to new lows. Easy enough to avoid.

Facebook and LinkedIn I would consider novel compared to usenet but it’s hard to tell the fakeness and bots from each other, or from static. Again, easy to avoid.

Most of the movies I would rent I just wait until they’re part of the included movies. Nobody is going to worry about waiting 3 months for that.

I bought a Honda Civic toy from an auto parts store recently. I thought it was purely static but it has a spring pull back motion and also flashes the lights and honks the horn when you open the doors.

Then I leaned on it and discovered it makes a starting noise and vrooms the engine.

I felt like I was 10 years old again.

It’s an odd change though. The rate of homicide per 100,000 for men goes down in they’re in the army (9.3 per 100,000 in the US general population) but for women their rate doubles.

Me too apparently. Trying to stay employed after my startup failed has been 3 years of shit. I’ve had 3 jobs in that time. The first one I was managed out, admittedly my fault as I was a poor fit for the culture of that place and had clashes with other employees. The second job I pulled my head in and did my best and got laid off after a restructure. I had a temporary reprieve as I took a management role laying off other people, a task which left me sobbing regularly to the point I had to quit even that. This job is a contract that isn’t getting renewed despite the feedback I was given that my performance was great and mentoring of younger staff had been noted as above and beyond.

I have just about hit rock bottom while grinding out job applications. I’m 58 this year with kids at university I simply can’t afford to be unemployed.

I don’t know whether I can afford to be employed either, workplaces have become a kind of toxic performance theatre where even if you tick all the boxes and do the out of hours schmoozing and whatnot you’re still treated like a service part to be discarded.

I can’t read LinkedIn any more. If it isn’t people being fake about their work experiences it’s half filled with retirees suffering from relevance deprivation syndrome reposting racist or anti woke nonsense to each other.

I’m done with working in this stupid environment but I need the damn money so my only hope is to make it home every day without steering the car into a tree.

Convenience. I don’t buy many movies digitally but it’s usually because the family is over and they want to watch something new.

Of course I may then pirate it afterwards so I can keep a backup of my purchased movie.

I did read somewhere that Gen X are the last gen in modern societies to see anything real. Everything is just a simulation of older things. All the stupid bars nd cafes with rustic wood and old timey aesthetics for example.

Did Hotz hit his head or something? Atheistic hedonists oh my!

Exactly. The pascal I used had no way to dynamically allocate a string they were all fixed at compile time. That really sucked.

Looking native has long left the station as an objection about a UI.

Like 25 years ago. Nobody gives a damn since Microsoft stopped giving a damn.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6114142/

Recommended for victims of sexual assault. Rather revoltingly one conservative objection to giving it to 9 years olds was that it would “increase risky behaviour” in that cohort, despite knowing that the biggest risk of sexually transmitted disease to children that age is rape by family member.

Men raping children is why they wanted to start at 9.

I had Claude write a bit of stupid C# the other day that had an off by one string truncate. Surprised the hell out of me.

Zero terminated strings were the basis for an awful lot of useful software. Calling them the biggest mistake in computing is a bit OTT.

I haven’t programmed anything Pascal related for 30+ years but I dimly remember thinking at the time that I wished the string system wasn’t so hard to use.