Friday Ephemera
Miracle breakthrough in rapid beer consumption. || Modern romance. (h/t, Holborn) || You never know. || Get woke, get robbed, repent at leisure. || It’s a bookmark, it’s a reading lamp. || A little nibble. || Heavenly beings. || Today’s word is Speibecken. || Behold, the basic social bonding unit of tomorrow. || “Can men control their balls?” || Beats walking. || A gift to remember. || Portuguese star fort. || “First and foremost.” || Faulty cat. || Acapella idents. || Treacherous human detected. || The thrill of tadpole migration. || “Essential seating only.” || Snowfall in Times Square, an ambient video. || Wall damage detected. || And finally, in D-list celebrity news, I believe this is called oversharing.
“just turn it off and turn it on again”
I think it was Asimov who said that the danger was not that computers would begin to think like people, but that people would begin to think like computers.
That certainly sounds like something Isaac would have said, but an internet search says it was columnist Sydney J. Harris: “The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.” (But, as usual, none of the search results point to an original source. Grumble.)
Tell me again why I should believe that these people are sane?
For most of my tech career I lived at the overlap of hw and sw development. So I got to reset the sw (yay.) And reset the hw (Yay!) which included boring things like the “900 lb. hammer test”.
Sigh. I miss the olden days.
My favorite hw from those days was a snark about an actual project called the “nuclear event detector”. My manager posted a folder paper on his door labeled “Bob’s Discount Event Detector, open to operate”.
Inside it read “If you are reading this, there has not been a nuclear event.”
Cold War humor…
Little has startled me more than hearing politicians talking about The Great Reset. That’s not how it works.
It works just fine* for those who are a sufficiently dillegent users of Orwell’s memory hole and Rand’s blank-out.
I think it was Asimov who said that the danger was not that computers would begin to think like people, but that people would begin to think like computers.
IIRC the same theme popped up somewhere in Herbert’s Dune series.
* – This is fine: https://tinyurl.com/3tv5qqq7
I think it was Asimov who said that the danger was not that computers would begin to think like people, but that people would begin to think like computers. The utter savaging of basic science education and the rise of Internet culture means that increasingly people are thinking like software developers
Kinda feel both ways on this, but the industry in general is IMNSHO lost to the point that the comments above about Bill Gates apply to much of the leadership in even smaller and/or less cutting edge software organizations. In an effort to try to preserve my sanity by giving myself something deep-thinking to keep my brain occupied, I have been responding to a few of the numerous software recruiter emails that I get. For a while there, I thought I was blacklisted due to politics but maybe not…but not my point…Anyway, for a job with a major financial institution, one of the ones that begins with the letter ‘C’, they wanted me to take an on-line Java test. I hate these damn things as I have been in the business for 35 years, I have a very strong (too strong…thinking of dumbing it down) resume of various technologies. My ability to survive and such in this business has not been because I memorize details of things like which is the thread-safe one, HashMap or HashTable (actually I know that one OTTOMH but others…). I use Google (and before that, software manuals) to remind me about the minor details and such. I learn new tools (many, many new tools) via their Hello World examples and have often gotten things, even new technology things, to work where other people before me failed. With modern IDE’s, if you make a minor syntactical mistake the IDE tells you the minute you type it out.
Now this test they wanted me to take had questions about “would this compile” (with some piece of code that no mature developer would ever write) and “are goto and null reserved words in Java”. Can’t think of a reason to use goto in Java and would likely fire anyone who did. Looking it up now, I see it was reserved but never implemented in the language…thus who the hell cares? What flipping difference does that make? 39 questions, apparently I only got 23 correct. Yet I have taken pure logic tests, only once explicitly for a job others on Indeed.com or some such, and scored exceptionally high. The one I took for a job I pointed out that some of their questions were vague/inaccurate. They were very impressed by this and thanked me for pointing out the flaws.
Hating Microsoft because you can’t use a computer is so 1998.
In 1990 I could run Windows 3.0 (upgraded from 2.1) with Word, Photostyler, and Pagemaker simultaneously on a 386 with a whopping 2 megs of RAM and a gigantic 40meg hard drive, and can now (just because I wanted to see if I could) run a 32 bit Linux version with Open Office and GIMP simultaneously on an ancient Pentium with a whole 2 gigs RAM, so hating Microsoft because all their products have become bloated (22 gigs for a stripped down Win 7 OS alone, over on the Ubuntu partition, 1.12 gigs for the OS and all the open source programs) with crappy code and useless garbage* is 2021.
*(Pour one out for Clippy, RIP.)
“Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit the human mind” IIRC.
“Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit the human mind”
Very close. Wikipedia quotes the prohibition in Dune as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”.
pst314: Wikipedia quotes the prohibition in Dune as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”.
We’ll soon see about that…
She played an empathic alien, you know.
She played an empathic alien, you know.
She is getting what she deserves, as she descends into obscurity. No more fan boys panting for an autograph while she wears that bodysuit uniform at Comic Con.
“Bill Gates has been so rich for so long that he’s spent the bulk of his adult life without anyone telling him he’s wrong…”
That appears to be Zuckerberg’s problem too: he thinks he’s far more powerful and important than individual nations.
She played an empathic alien, you know.
Yes, and she was the most useless crew member on that show. Wesley Crusher was less insufferable.
Woke activism, distilled.
Via Damian.
Regarding D-list oversharing, *singing* “His penis got diseases from a Chumash tribe!”
“March 11, 1995 with the release of Microsoft Bob.”
Free Software advocates would make the case for January 1976.
“In lighter news, an excellent 4K upgrade rendering of an old video.”
Weirdly, it actually makes it look even more ’80s.
“as James Randi once said about scientists, they’re very good at detecting error and very bad at detecting deliberate falsehood.”
Thus, the Great Pan
demic. If The Scientists had taken the advice of that Hong Kong protester not to trust China because China asshoe, we wouldn’t be in this mess.“That’s not how it works.”
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb put it (quoted from memory), “Mainstream economists have this idea that the economy is like a machine. It’s really more like a cat.”
“In 1990 I could run…”
I was an Amiga diehard. As late as 2005, I was running a web browser (among plenty of other stuff) in a graphical desktop from a 120 megabyte hard drive. And it booted in about 20 seconds.
Truly, Computers Are Broken (and We’re All Going to Die).
I’ll just leave this here.
As humans age, their neuroplasticity (and hence ability to absorb and process new information) declines precipitously. This is why children can pick up multiple languages easily but mature adults struggle.
It is common for software/hardware professionals who were once capable of easily absorbing any new innovation and of keeping the entirety of “the tech field” in their head to age out of this state and struggle with new concepts or paradigm shifts in the state of the art. When this happens, many such professionals demark any tech prior to that point in their lives as “good” and anything after as “bad”, “unnecessary”, “poorly designed”, or “misguided”. This is referred to, tongue-in-cheek, as “suffering from a terminal case of Stoll’s Syndrome”.
Sam Duncan
I stayed in the Queen Margaret Hall residences–I don’t have the address handy, but I do remember you would walk through the botanical gardens, cross a busy intersection and go a couple more blocks, iirc, before turning left and going up a hill (?) to get to the main campus.
I really loved my time there. Maybe shouldn’t have drunk so much, but it seemed every social occasion had lager and little glasses of whiskey. I recall one social event just for foreign students put on by some religious organisation and even it had trays of whiskeys.
[pours little glass of gin, loses present self in happy reverie, whilst reminding himself to stay from the italics]
whilst reminding himself to stay from the italics
[ Points to enormous, illuminated sign. ]
[ Resumes nonchalant wiping of bar. ]
This is referred to, tongue-in-cheek, as “suffering from a terminal case of Stoll’s Syndrome”.
My goodness, I haven’t heard anything about/from Clifford Stoll since Silicon Snake Oil was published in 1995. I have no idea what he’s been saying since then. What do you know?
I do vaguely recall his experiment comparing the reliability of snail mail vs. email, and it seems to me that email has become vastly more reliable in the intervening 25 years: in the few cases where an email was lost the sender received a message to that effect.
On the other hand, I do recognize that ebooks have some disadvantages (and with an infinite budget I would purchase both print and Kindle editions of most books) but ebooks have made more books available and have made it possible to quickly preview a book.
a 120 megabyte hard drive
Hard drive? Luxury. I ‘ad a BBC Micro wi’ cassette tapes!
BBC Micro
Casette tapes? We were lucky to have punched cards. And we ‘ad to punch our own ‘oles wi’t tip of our noses.
Someone fetch Karl’s carer. He’s getting overexcited again.
Punched cards
Punched cards? We used to dream about punched cards. We ‘ad stone tablets and a chisel.
And every afternoon, around about teatime, Moses used to come down from t’mountain and whip us to death.
But you try and tell the young programmers that today. They won’t believe ya’!
Aye.
[ Fetches sedative darts, blowpipe. ]
And a lowercase ‘l’ for a one…
https://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=We%20Didn%27t%20Have%20Zeros
Careful now!
Bill Gates, self proclaimed expert in all things, amazed by a sewage treatment plant.
Also culpable: pro bono lawyers at San Francisco law firms who made it impossible to prosecute and punish the criminally aggressive “homeless”.”
very true. as i recall from my days in Big Law, this was largely driven by the firms’ drive to recruit top law school talent by promising recruitees they could indulge their juvenile sense of social justice if they came aboard. all that ‘pro bono’ work was in fact fully paid for, of course: by the (padded) fees charged to its regular business clients.
Careful now!
Yes. I’ve long believed that in a dark, air conditioned basement there’s a lonely Commodore 64 with thousands of wires attached to it…and it’s at the heart of everything.
A chap I know designed a language the only uses blank characters.
No, really.
Punched cards? We used to dream about punched cards. We ‘ad stone tablets and a chisel.
You had chisels?
After watching several clips of Marina Sirtis on ST panels I came to the conclusion that she was a nasty piece of work.
Same thought on Garrett Wang.
My goodness, I haven’t heard anything about/from Clifford Stoll since Silicon Snake Oil was published in 1995. I have no idea what he’s been saying since then.
Not too long ago he did a few videos on the Numberphile channel, including this one one on the first fully electronic calculator. No microchips, just single transistors and other components. And an ingenious way to implement memory. https://youtu.be/2BIx2x-Q2fE?t=77
A chap I know designed a language the only uses blank characters.
What’s next, a Klingon version of Cobol?
We were lucky to have punched cards.
That reminds me: I recently reread Arthur C. Clark’s 1955 novel Earthlight. It mentions punched cards and paper tape, and yet it still reads well thanks to Clarke’s skill.
Rare film of software development at Microsoft.
Klingon programming.
Klingon programming.
Karl, I am going to drag you into the Correction Booth–just as soon as I finish laughing.
“I stayed in the Queen Margaret Hall residences”
Oh, yes. I know the place. Over Kirklee way, next to Kelvinside Academy. They rebuilt it about 20 years ago, but a Queen Margaret Hall is still on the same spot. And your recollection of the route doesn’t fail you. It really is a great area for walking. I’ve often said it has the air of a university town almost like Oxford, Cambridge, or St. Andrews (Durham, maybe?) that’s been swallowed up by a great city.
And an ingenious way to implement memory.
Posted by: NateWhilk
From George Dyson’s fascinating book “Turing’s Cathedral” on early computing:
“In March of 1953 there were 53 kilobytes of random access memory on planet Earth. [They] were unevenly distributed among [a] dozen machines…Each island in the archipelago constituted a universe unto itself.”
These kilobytes were stored in, among other methods, “acoustic delay lines” consisting of ripples in 5 foot tanks of mercury.
The above is a condensed quote. The book is well worth reading,
about a rich and strange time.
–Bad News
Klingon programming.
I remember seeing that on segfault.org. I actually found the page backed up in my archives, “last modified” 11/10/99! Here’s the info: “Posted on Thu 28 Oct 06:40:21 1999 PDT Written by Martib Hepworth maxsec@usa.net“
And yes, I am an old fogey.
NateWhilk, thanks for posting that, and thereby restoring credit to the originator. (I get very annoyed at people who post things without attribution.)
I have no idea what he’s been saying since then. What do you know?
The magnitude of the self-own becomes apparent when you realize that the book claimed the Internet would not, and architecturally could not, be used for things it was actively being used for at the time of the book’s publication.
To his credit, Stoll has been good-natured about the whole thing and freely admits he got just about everything wrong.