palordrolap

There’s an old saying: “If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.”

Tables still work and probably always will, whether they’re meant for layout or not.

CGI on the other hand, has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur. If you need that, you’ll have to learn something new. Or find a very amenable host.

Semantics, semantics.

If you manage to run TempleOS on the bare metal, your CPU and fans will be stuck at 100% until you turn it off or your CPU overheats.

Run it in a VM and you won’t have that problem.

You can argue that anything above Ring -3 is virtual, but “if I do this my CPU’s going to die” is a pretty reasonable dividing line between “technically” and “actually”.

If only I had the skills to rework the Pet Shop Boys’ classic into a parody.

(For the clueless, they had a song called “It’s a Sin”.)

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

It’s been a good many years since I had my nose in my copy, but I am glad I was able to read it at a time of my life that I could attain some appreciation and understanding of it. Right now, I don’t think I could focus my attention long enough to get back into it.

I haven’t sought out Hofstadter’s other works, but if I could get that mindset back, I’d definitely consider it. I Am a Strange Loop is on my want-to-read list.

And if the surname seems familiar, a character in a popular TV show was given his surname on purpose by the writers.

Class of '99 here.

There’s at least a decade between the beginning of that list and people regularly using punch cards and tape. Maybe two.

Magnetic tapes and actually floppy floppy disks were the medium of choice in the interim.

Lots of things, but let’s say the toaster.

Pretty sure it was a wedding present that my parents got a few years before I came along, so it’s over 50 years old at this point. It didn’t get any use for the first 30 years of its existence, but I’ve had it for longer than 20, so it counts either way.

So many questions.

Would I be aware? Would I have any senses whatsoever? Would they scale with the size of the object or would they remain full size? How long would the situation last, or would I be stuck like that until the destruction of the object? What counts as destruction? How much of my humanity and who and what I am carries over?

How would you feel if one of your inanimate possessions was inhabited by the spirit of someone of unknown desires who once answered a question to some unseen asker?

What if it was your childhood teddy bear? I mean I might chose to be one of those with the purest of intents, but it’s still super creepy; what is for all intents and purposes, a grown man, voyeur, inhabiting a teddy bear, and so the true purest of intents mean that I can’t in good conscience be something like that.

So maybe I ought to lean into the creepy and inhabit a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles worn by someone high up in an intelligence agency with a three letter acronym. If anyone needs spying on, it’s spies.

I actually did this for a laugh a very, very long time ago. I had upgraded my 75MHz Pentium machine from 8MB to a whopping 40MB, so since I knew it would run fine with just 8, I installed a TSR RAMdisk and told Windows 3.1 to put its swap on that drive.

It worked great, but I decided I’d rather use the memory for other things.

But in more modern times, I’ve literally forced browser caches into memory-based tmpfs to take the load off system disks, which is basically the same thing. And it reduces wear on my hardware.

I was being a silly goose and pretending I was more clueless than I actually am.

(Probably not by as much as I’d like to think.)

Perl doesn’t radicalise anyone, but it might turn them into a funny character.

False. It’s a shell synonym for /home/ah-ha-ha-nice-try-you-are-not-getting-my-real-homedir-name

… it’s a PITA to type out longhand, let me tell you.

I forgor the tilde and its taking a long time. wat do

Something has to trigger my memory, but there are things in my head that are easily pre-Internet. There might even be a couple that are from before my own existence passed down from my parents.

The question is then whether I let them escape my head and I’m not sure where the dividing line on “still use” is.

For example, and I don’t know why this one in particular, “Nice one, Cyril” is older than I am, and exists in my head, but I don’t post it anywhere online either in earnest or sarcastically because no-one would understand it. But my head uses it occasionally.

The thing is that it’s apparently expected that everyone use AI.

With StackOverflow it was less than the full complement of developers who went there for help, so there was always someone to provide answers.

AI will kill StackOverflow and places like it. AI will create a dearth of new developers, and those that still choose the profession will be AI rotted and unable to move up or advance. They won’t post anywhere on the Internet, and even if they do, what they know was derived from StackOverflow before it stopped being updated. That’s not even a complete cover of tech now, let alone several years down the line when tech has moved on.

This whole thing is cashing in an investment and in 20 years we’re going to be confused about why that investment is no longer accruing interest.

The soft option perspective (I see plenty of command-line-only solutions here already):

These days, if I’m doing any major navigation, I do it the uncool way and use the GUI file manager bundled with my distro. I have the option enabled to show the “open a terminal at this location” button if I really want to start issuing commands.

If you’d rather stay on the command line, a compromise might be to use something like Midnight Commander. Back in my DOS days I used to use an equivalent there on a regular basis, but that’s because I hadn’t launched Windows and didn’t feel like it was necessary to do what I wanted. (It was possible to patch Win 9x to behave like earlier Win 3.x so that it stopped at the DOS prompt and didn’t load Windows, which fit my aesthetic at the time.)

These days I prefer my comforts and I sure as heck don’t boot Linux to a command line unless something’s really wrong!

These things should not exist, but if they must then they should be put to this sort of use.

Enjoy your levitating cat.

I had something about stagnation in the comment at one point, but I guess my attempt to make it implicit didn’t quite survive the edit.

My concern is that the current models have been trained on current technology by stealing knowledge from the existing pool of senior and junior engineers as well as a whole load of hobbyists.

If everyone moves up to senior now using LLMs, that’s all well and good now, but then there’ll be no juniors to steal the grunt work from to train AI and no-one to move up to senior in a decade or two.

Do you really think that the hobbyists are going to be enough to steal from to perpetuate the system in the near future?

Do me a favour. Or rather yourself a favour. Look out for signs of burnout and do whatever you can to avoid it.

Because I once took a job that was completely against my desire and nature. I was on the phone with customers a lot. I communicated with complete strangers a lot. For a decade and a half.

And I was so good at it that I didn’t feel like I could quit or escape and I basically melted down and burnt out, and now those old mechanisms and mental tricks I used to do to get me up and at 'em every day do. not. work. And neither can I.

I have an LED light bulb that came with a dedicated remote control to change the colour and brightness, but I’m guessing that’s not what you’re looking for.

You could rig up something more intelligent that sends out the same IR signals to one of those if you were savvy enough, I suppose. I am not and have not.

Brand was generic. Works fine for my purposes.