I mean, unless you know the various arcane aspects of Windows, it's pretty hilariously un-friendly when you step off the path, too. After a decade of using Gnome exclusively, whenever a friend asks for help with Windows, all I can do is shrug and suggest reinstalling and/or living with the pain.
The last company I worked for it honestly took me about two months to actually grok what they were doing with their forms because I couldn't fathom why you'd do this input-listener business on the FE while the backend was all Django APIs. They had re-engineered a form wizard flow and scattered the state management into three places (some in the API calls, some in third party API calls in the middle of the flow, and a decent chunk in the React flow via cookies/sessions). It was madness trying to debug it.
That's a pretty nice fundamental law. Explains the rot that occurs with land ownership as well. Really, stopping wealth accretion via non-action would probably help with some of the nastier outcomes of a regulated market economy. I suppose it's probably too late for us, however. Revolution, ahoy!
haha, I swear I read Marx and Engels, but it was 25 years ago. So I suppose the problem we find ourselves in now is the feedback loop of capital sources being so well endowed there's no risk of investment to create more capital.
I hadn't really thought about PHP through this lens. But it's so much a part of where it came from as a preprocessor for text. It was a first-class part the stateless design of the OG internet. Now everyone wants all things persisted all the time, and leads to crazy state problems.
Cynicism wins the day because negative outcomes are easier to plan for than positive outcomes. Humans defaulting to optimistic outcomes of the future often end up littering the ground with externalities that they failed to consider. And we also only have a single model for infinite growth (cancer) that always leads to destruction, so relentless optimism as a biological organism means a need for infinite growth, which we only know to be a path to destruction.
The answer, therefore, is not bitching on the internet about all the wet blankets who only see negative outcomes, but acknowledging that everything we know needs to end eventually including ourselves, and balancing optimism for the short term with cynicism for the long term. And thus discovering that a healthy cynicism for the future predictions is probably appropriate, unless you truly want to live forever and have infinite energy for everything. But that's a god.
Easier to plan for is an interesting lens to look through, can't immediately discard it for sure.
From my perspective, negative expectations do have a higher chance of turning out real, but because negative expectations most often are just code for human misalignment. We have some philosophical, instinctual, or aesthetic (etc.) preferences, but then reality is always going to be broader than that. So you're bound to hit things that are in misalignment. It takes active effort to cultivate the world to be whatever particular way. But this is also why I find simple pleas to cynicism particularly hollow. It comes off as resignation, exactly where the opposite is what would be most required.
That's a fair counter argument, and I do genuinely believe (not know) that everyone needs a balance of cynicism and optimism to function optimally as a human. I also believe the resignation you feel from cynicism is rampant exactly because as humans we've become very good at basic survival and beyond that it's not totally clear what our targets for living should be. Certainly we can all agree that trying to harness ever more energy and growing forever can't be the target. But that's all we've done for two millennia now. How to we avoid becoming a cancer to our planet (or any other environment we find ourselves in)?
Wat? E-trade is not an application, it's probably dozens of coordinated services. Meanwhile, a game usually has a single binary and another one for the server.
I wonder if it was the Creative Nomad [1] ... I had a Jukebox that had a 6GB spinning disk in it originally. Upgrading to a 20GB drive was the first real hackery thing I did with my old RedHat box. I had to buy an IDE converter too to move between the laptop connector to the desktop.
That was also when I learned what happens if you dd a Creative Nomad Jukebox system image onto your root partition while the machine is running. The RedHat install stayed stable for about 20 minutes before weird things started failing and eventually the whole thing just locked up. Remember kids, always check you dd out file path!
My first MP3 player was the Creative MuVo. The storage part (actually, really everything but the battery holder) you could disconnect and use as a USB stick, which was also how you loaded music onto it. I (correctly) thought this was very cool.
I eventually did get an iPod, the one that was all capacitive touch buttons and wheel, the last one before the click wheel.
The other thing that was great about the MuVo music players is that they all had tactile controls. I used to listen with them while riding my bicycle, and I could operate mine in any way I needed to with it still in my pocket: repeating a track, skipping a track, changing albums, toggling shuffle, etc.
Looks like the 5th gen Ipod was the thing in 2005/2006, per wikipedia. Sounds like I graduated HS +/- a year or two of the author.
In that time frame... I was using sub-GB MP3 players, with MMC cards or maybe SD cards by that point. (I didn't have those massive multi-thousand song collections, so it was fine...)
Because I have pics saved in my personal folder, mine in high school/early college were:
- Classic 64MB w/ 128 MB memory card
- MPIO FL100, probably 2 or 3x bigger; I wore this on a belt holder
- Sandisk Sansa, the bulbous one, before later using some of the smaller ones. Probably still only 256 or 512 MB of built-in storage.
I loved my SanDisk Sansa. It had a specific category for audiobooks, and there were a lot of quality of life things - features that wouldn’t matter when you were listening to songs but that made listening to books on tape way better.
- If you held the fast forward button it would slowly increase the speed it fast forwarded. Not something that matters with a 2 minute song, but it really matters with an hour long audiobook section.
- If you went to listen to something else but then you came back to the audiobook, it would open with the section you’d been listening to highlighted, and if you selected it it would pick up where you’d left off. If you accidentally skipped forward you could back out, move back to the previous section, and it’d do the same thing - starting where you’d been.
- On top of that, you could add more storage with microSD cards!
2005 is when I got a second-hand Sony Ericsson K750 phone that had been reflashed to the W800 Walkman phone firmware (the hardware was the same) and I started using my phone as my MP3 player. It was also my only usable digital camera (the other one was one of those terrible cheap RAM-based ones, and this had a really decent 2MP shooter). Really that device delineated the beginning of the convergence era for me.
I have a relative who works in healthcare. The introduction of AI for medical notes has led her level+1 manager to ask folks to increase their patient numbers in response to the extra time saved not having to manually code charts.
The initial response was some grumbling about unionization of the doctor-class. But now they're just kinda going along with it while also complaining loudly. Profit Über alles.
Don't worry. There's so much heat, we little humans could never affect any significant change /s
EDIT But seriously. I remember years ago going to a residential GT workshop encouraging private heat sink wells hosted by some boomer reformed hippies. When I asked if there were any studies on the effect of subsurface heat exchange on things like ground water temperatures or different subsurface materials one of the presenters waved it off saying it was probably fine and the other honestly admitted that they didn't know, and that that should probably give us pause before encouraging 200 homes in a square mile all sink wells.
this hole goes 5km out of 6.378km. So 0.1% of the way. Even if we drilled all over the surface (and see floor) it would make very little difference. There is just a lot of Earth and the heat conducts very slowly.
Atmosphere on the other hand is very thin and mostly concentrated close to surface (half is under 5km) so it's much easier for humans to fuck it up
I want to believe this. But it just seems like every generation of humans has their "would make very little difference" moment. When it comes to energy, it turns out there's just no such thing as a free lunch.
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