smitelli

CyberS3XY was what I always figured he was going for.

Never played Thief, but I logged a lot of hours in Unreal, 1998. I was (and still am) amazed at how full-featured the software renderer was. I always wished I could peek at the code behind it.

If memory serves, the only thing my 3dfx Voodoo3 could do that software-only mode could not was surface reflections. Maybe something with colored lighting too, it's been a long time. Point is, it was a decent enough substitute for dedicated graphics hardware.

There are definitely outside organizations whose sole responsibility is to monitor TV/radio broadcasts and nowadays even podcast sponsor breaks to ensure that ad copy is inserted as agreed. (Source: I was contracted to do some of that work for a time.)

You mean something other than ⌘+` ?

I'm the person who reimplemented Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (DOS, 1992) and my original reasoning was a desire to know how it was able to do some of the graphical tricks it did on such underpowered hardware (it could run on an IBM AT). The game wasn't anything special by any metric, but it was an important piece of my childhood and I felt an attachment to it. I also learned a hell of a lot about the PC platform, the C ecosystem from the 80s, and my own tastes as an engineer.

https://github.com/smitelli/cosmore

https://cosmodoc.org/

https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/em-dash-tool/

I'd be interested in seeing an example of a well-composed 9:16 portrait photo. All the ones I have found look awkward.

https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/em-dash-tool/

I gotta say, I don't have the right personality traits to enjoy this kind of personal attention a lot of the time.

I've had experiences where the counter staff at my daily breakfast place started to recognize me and know what "usual" my order was going to be without my having to say it... and it really weirded me out more than anything else.

Sometimes I just want to be a faceless nobody, forgotten day after day by the businesses I visit and the public spaces I navigate.

Percy Livermore: We must rid our speech of slang. Now, besides "OK", I want you all to promise me that there are two words that you will never use. One of these is "swell" and the other one is "lousy".

Lucy Ricardo: OK, what are they?

Percy Livermore: [with emphasis] One of them is "swell" and the other one is "lousy".

Fred Mertz: Well, give us the lousy one first.

Never realized the "chunky" in my chunky peanut butter was so profane. /s

Good for occasional use. Feed it a big playlist and you might find yourself IP-banned for a week.

Some call this phenomenon the Goomba fallacy.

I really respect Jim Davis, believe it or not. Draw the cat, collect the money, keep mouth shut.

I have been nerd-sniped into conjuring up a less-traveled-path technique:

Portable Python on the Windows computer. `python -m http.server`. On the Linux computer, something like `wget -mkp` followed by `find … -delete` to get rid of the index files.

(Lots of disks are soldered in nowadays, or the procedure might require multiple M2 slots that the destination mobo might not have. Is your company IT department happy to know their hardware is being disassembled?)

I have not benchmarked to see if this would sustain the 120 Mbps the original scenario would require.

The thing I found interesting in trying to type out a single test sentence is how many of the letters were reachable with just a tap. It wasn’t until I really studied the layout closely that I noticed that it wasn’t in true alphabetical order. Oddly intuitive, although I would probably despise using it long-term.

To my ear it sounds like AFSK, kind of like the Bell 202 scheme. Here's the first passable search result I found with a clean recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PXxSHGrF-8

What happens on the day when those people just directly pay some AI model to do it?

Data Becker Music Center, the first real MIDI composition software I ever used. Came with a pretty decent dead-tree printed manual. Hadn't thought about that one in a long time.

Fun fact: In the US the concept of time-and-a-half (also minimum wage, and not hiring child labor) was created by the Fair Labor Standards Act. Most tech employees are classified as "exempt" -- the FLSA and its protections doesn't apply to them.

Having the primary/secondary rotation is arguably worse. In that model, from the perspective of any one participant, now they're on-call for two weeks each time around instead of one.

I've never liked any answer I've gotten to questions like "what's the weather like."

I look at the forecast in my weather app -- the whole fullscreen thing -- and follow some sort of mental algorithm that I can't fully specify to arrive at the conclusion about what to wear/bring. The spoken data feels like it's missing something, or maybe it's just transmitted in a sequence that my brain can't work with.

It's not that I don't trust it, exactly. It's that I can't use it for the task I'm trying to do. Never could. I have this problem with a lot of voice interfaces, and it suggests to me that either a) they're not very good, or b) my brain is not designed for that kind of UX.

In FF DevTools, open settings, under "Inspector" check the box for "Show Browser Styles." It clutters the window up some, but I've gotten used to it.

"Say McDonalds to end commercial" https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/

Plumbers are paid quite well and they deal with actual, literal shit. It is not glamorous work, but I would have to guess there is likely less disillusionment and burnout in plumbing overall compared to software.

Sigh. Fine, I'll do it.

What's a butfor?

Analog tape can sound pretty damn good, depending on the total surface area used and how fast it moves past the record/play heads.

super slow

    $ units
    Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2022-12-14
    3753 units, 113 prefixes, 120 nonlinear units
    
    You have: (2 * 238854 mi) / c
    You want: ms
            * 2564.4291
            / 0.00038995034

Many moons ago, I randomly discovered that the built-in text to speech engine on Windows 2000 would pronounce “crotch” as “crow’s nest.” Never found any reference to it online at the time, although today it’s pretty well documented. It’s possible I was one of the first people to find that.

I’m sure it was a bug and not some kind of self-censoring thing, but I had (and still have) no good explanation for it. Language is weird.

Reminds me of the networked vending machines in Computer Science House at RIT [0].

[0] https://csh.rit.edu/about/projects.html

Full disclosure: I was involved in a hardware overhaul on all those machines, about 15-20 years ago.