smallerdemon

My spouse has a background in engineering and health sciences and is an Excel fan. I do IT support, and I kind of hate Excel, but I kind of love Apple's Numbers app.

"These effortless pleasures, these ready-made distractions that are the same for every one over the face of the whole Western world, are surely a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were."

Well... this aged like fine milk in retrospect to what was coming 20 years down the line.

If there's one thing we've learned in the past year is that curly haired men named Sam in the tech industry claiming that they are doing it "for the good of all humanity" probably ain't doin' -anything- for the good of humanity.

57 pages in before we get a single screenshot. In a lot of ways, I miss this kind of weird ass writing about introducing people to computers with so little previous context to computing.

OTOH, 57 pages in before we start telling us how to use it seems like the fore bearer of 2023 recipes on web pages: "I love chocolate chip cookies. My mother used to make them for me back in 1970s after a day out in the late fall. My mother died in the late fall in 1986, and that is the year I set out to recreate my mother's cookie recipe for myself."

Let's see... what does Stanford reward? checks notes Oh. Oh my.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188828810/stanford-universit...

Well, I'm sure that resignation came about after a thorough finding of misconduct. checks notes Oh. Exonerated?! https://www.science.org/content/article/stanford-president-t...

Well, I'm sure that these were probably shocking, recent revelations that brought this about? checks notes again Years, you say?

https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/sta...

Oh Stanford. You scamp.

I also hate it. My hatred stems from the fact that it's very much a tech bro ideology. They get it into their head that THEIR system is 'the one'. It's the same way that tech bro weirdos running startups get it in THEIR head that THEIR product is some sort of life changing piece of technology that every human on the planet is going to ultimately adopt once they just "understand it". And god forbid if the product does catch on, because then it's a horrific confirmation bias to them. So instead of luck and market coercion, the product's success is evidence of their brilliance.

I know that seems like a weird conclusion to get to from this, but having read a LOT of these types of articles over the years and seeing people's convictions and deep seated beliefs about their categorization systems, it really underscores a lot of how humans get it in their heads about their POV of the world is the 'right one' that the rest of the world should get on board with.

Honestly, if you want to do this, just study and use the Library of Congress cataloging system: https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/ui/en_US/htdocs/help/numbers.h...

The energy in creating your own catalog system to this extent while one already exists seems pretty ridiculous.

Why not Dewey Decimal? Well... I mean... I guess you could. But most libraries have converted to LOC since it is fully supported and still receives attention and updates to categorizations.

Yeah. All systems like this have to account for ad-hoc additions. Otherwise you will often jam a few squares into some circles just to accommodate your categorization system.

Is this the one that was speculated on as being a hoax / joke?

Same.

This is my head canon for how birthing of babies happened in The Matrix.

Yeah, if you find an honest dentist in 2023 in the United States, never, ever go to anyone else. Thank GOD I found one recently. After a cross country move I put off going to the dentist for FIVE years because my previous dentist was amazing. The first one I tried was a bizarre Christian cult with a bunch of chi-chi crap in the lobby, and contemporary Christian music that -the dentist hummed along to while working on my teeth-. And then the calls started "You need X, Y, Z and probably A, B and C." and I was like "Nah. Fuck right off." Two more years without, and FINALLY found a guy who was like "You're teeth are fine. We'll keep an eye on some of these, but only worry about them if they cause you pain or have sudden changes." Guy is a gem.

Fingers crossed that it can actually be replicated in future studies and research. We definitely don't want another nearly 20 years of false path ass busting research based on falsified documentation like we ended up with on Alzheimer studies.

As dumb as it always comes across, telling people to reboot their systems after nearly 25 years in IT support is something we're still doing to this day. And we're still doing it because it works more often than not when someone is calling about performance problems. Why? It's not unusual to see uptime numbers in the 300s or longer for some people.

We all have that story. One was someone I work with telling my his laptop was interminably slow and unusable and wondering what he could do to fix it. First question: "How often do you restart it?" Him: "What do you mean?" Me: "You know, turn it off and back on, or just select restart." Him: "Oh, I've never done that ?" Me: "Hm. How long have you had it?" Him: "Four years."

Four years without a reboot. The next week when I saw him and asked him if restarting it helped: "Yes! It's running like new again!"

My analogy for this is simple: Do you clean your house? Yes. Do you do it intentionally? Like, you know, set out to do it? Or does it just 'happen' passively without you doing anything at all? (Paying someone else to do it not withstanding.) Most people actively, intentionally clean. But you know what they don't do? Actively, intentionally get it dirty. Getting dirty is a passive action of living; of just existing and functioning. It's the same for your computer. Using it causes clutter that a reboot will clean up. But you have to do the reboot intentionally.

Reminds me of Merlin Mann's "perfect apostrophe": http://www.43folders.com/2006/06/11/perfect-apostrophe

I make my living within this 20% of non-functionality.

Truly, microwave popcorn is atrocious for all sorts of reasons.

As top vote getting comment points out, regular popcorn is SO easy and SO much better. I have no idea why anyone wants to make microwave popcorn when the regular way is just as easy, taste better, and in now demonstrably healthier.

And crazy sour ales. I would welcome the return of some imperial stout and porter efforts from these guys.

Well this isn't like the plot of TWO movies made about having body parts repossessed or anything.

HOLY SHIT! THERE HE IS!

Entire Article: "Can alligators X? Yes. Yes they can."

TREE GATORS! TERROR OF THE FLORIDA SKIES!

Interesting to a certain point and then it kind of gets really repetitive and boring. It's a five page fan fic in a 30 chapter bag.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7dl42TsP84 Tokyo to Osaka by local train only. 11 hours.

Another TeamView, LogMeIn former user eh? :)

Ultimately I just gave up on trying these out since they always end up adding conditions that make them impossible to use for free (looking at you especially TeamView). That said, I'm still relying on a a free product from a commercial company, but not a remote desktop one. In the end I have set up a ZeroTier VLAN that I have all my machines on so I can just use built in remote desktop services and SSH.

I recently read this article while searching for how these towers are used in 2022. It's truly a work of engineering genius for the era. There are still many of these towers around the place where I live if you drive up and down the interstates. It's why I started searching for them to begin with.

Having worked in IT supporing doctors, nurses, scientists, and academics for the last 23 years, in all honesty, it doesn't matter what they would have chosen it would have resulting in a percentage of them complaining. Doctors like change that they control and understand, such as research leading to new treatments and improved patient outcomes. They do NOT like having their workflows challenged, though. They have very specific prescriptive actions that they live by, and again, they only like changing those when it benefits them in some tangible way. EHRs benefit their -institutions- in tangible ways, not them. EHRs benefit billing, administrative, regulatory departments more than they benefit providers... in the eyes of the providers.

I work at an institution made up of components institutions, many of which use their own independent EHR systems. What doctors LIKE are the ones they get used to in their residency, fellowships, and first years in practice. Older doctors coming from paper straight to ANY EHR will struggle without extensive assistance from their support staff. Nurses rarely get support staff, and usually ARE the support staff to a provider in addition to their nursing duties. The overall feeling I get, though, is that most of them that have used Epic like it. Cerner as well. Some others in the institution like Meditech, less so (due to largely archaic interfaces dressed up with some more current UI). But Epic and Cerner are the big players in the game. There are many, many others, and in the end what ends up mattering is the support staff for the EHR both local and vendor. One we use has gone to a lot of off-shore tier 2 and tier 3 support staff lately, and it truly is a struggle in unforeseeable ways (such as terrible telecom infrastructure making it often impossible to communicate with vendor support staff). They are all focused on new customers and growth and then maintaining the customers, and it certainly makes you feel like an afterthought as a standing customer.

When Google first appeared on the tech scene, a lot of us were excited to have a great tool for search that actually kicked back relevant things you needed. And they toyed with great experiments, most of which are all dead except for the most boring of them: the traditional productivity suite of email, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. (For the record, I have never seen or heard of a single person in my entire knowledge of Google ever use Slides.) Of course, Chromebooks and Chrome as well (but...).

Their missteps are so public and feel so egregious, and that's what this article is underscoring. Great and fun things that clearly they are not able to monetize, no matter how much they throw into it. Yet the things that they go all in on are usually things no one actually needs or wants, such as Google Plus and Stadia. Instead, as again pointed out by the article, Google puts out great experiments that people love, and the management and marketing at Google simply are never able to get their shit together to monetize those things in ways to make the products profitable enough to keep around, such as the article-mentioned Reader (which I am also still bitter about), and just destroying other great tools like Picasa to hoist less useful web-based generic experiences upon the user base they build up.

Google is really, truly, at this point so many years into their existence, an afterthought for most end users. When non-tech people say Google they mean Chrome almost 100% of the time. They mean a web browser. People still have and use yahoo.com and aol.com emails more than anyone thinks, and gmail might be Google's second most successful product after Chrome, but for a grand majority, Google = Chrome.

The Google Graveyard site exists for a reason. https://killedbygoogle.com/

I love this.

Perhaps Frakenstein wasn't so much about science gone awry as wealth gone awry. Rich guy creates thing he thinks he wants and will make him famous, is horrified when it turns out exactly like he wanted. This is rich people hoarding wealth, making even MORE poor people, and then being horrified when poor people exists.