I am going to do a two thread thing in this pinned post.
One will have a list of lessons that I believe that I have learned in life and that I wish that I had learned earlier. I know that I cannot go back and change things but a least I can keep them as reminders for myself so that I hopefully can remember not to repeat them, and if they help anyone else that is a bonus.
The other will be a list of words that I think have problematic usage and/or meanings. I have a few that I see as especially having issues. I decided to go ahead and write on this because of an encounter with someone else here who stated that they thought “offended” was problematic when I said that I was sorry that I had offended them. Offend is not one of my problem ones, though I may have to rethink that.
Lessons that I have learned in life and wish I had learned earlier.
1 ) Walk away from people who hurt you.
2 ) Wrong is hurting people unnecessarily; Evil is deliberately hurting people unnecessarily.
3 ) It is much better to be alone than to be in a bad relationship. Never be afraid of walking away (I have done so even when it left me unhoused)
4 ) Always save everything that you want to keep in files that you have multiple backups of, this includes links to anything that you might want to share.
5 ) The first thing that you need to learn about any online space is how to block, keep yourself safe.
6 ) You do not have to set yourself on fire to keep anyone else warm. Take care of yourself.
7 ) Trust your inner impression, if you feel that you are in danger or that a person or organization might hurt you get away as fast as possible.
8 ) Live your own truth, do not let others tell you who you are.
9 ) Just because someone is genetically related to you or has known you for a long time does not give them the right to hurt you or to run your life.
10 ) The book is virtually always better than the movie.
11 ) Always save your search links, not just the bookmarks, Google will reorder things tomorrow and you will not be able to find what you are looking for since someone else will pay them to place theirfacts higher on the search order - market determines what you find for not actual FACTS
12 ) Always fact check, most of what you hear is lies. This is even more true for things on the internet.
13 ) If you are the only one who is seeing reality everyone else in the crowd is bound to think you are the one with the delusions
14 ) Sadly, far far too many people want to hurt other innocent people in the name of their god
Multi-seeded sourdough after 4hrs bulk fermentation, 1.5hrs in bannetons and after 4hrs in the fridge (another 14 hours to go) using an Alaskan starter, 20% of home milled Emmer flour and 5% home milled cracked Emmer wheat. very strong white Canadian flour plus chopped sage. #sourdough#bread#breadposting#emmer#flour#milling#canadian#sage#alaskan
The next two - Multi-seeded sourdough after 4hrs bulk fermentation, 1.5hrs in bannetons and 4hrs in the fridge using a rye starter, 20% of home milled Einkorn flour and 5% home milled cracked Einkorn wheat plus chopped sage and sage flower petals. #sourdough#bread#breadposting#einkorn#flour#milling#canadian#sage
While @tastytronic is setting up the new more powerful #dec#flipchip tester (in its snazzy #pdp12 livery!), I went to re-watch the videos about the tester that the #umnpdp12 project uploaded to YouTube. The last one ended with a classic fix (CLEAN THE CONTACTS, LADS) while diagnosing the LINCTape, and they didn't even test the cards before making progress: https://youtu.be/aiHSRF_2bmk
I did a bit of digging into #LINCTape and #DECTape over the past couple years, and so here's a #VintageComputing thread with some of the backstory on these tape formats.
Quick pre-pre-LINC history: Project Whirlwind was the Lincoln Labs computer that ultimately became the model for the #SAGE air defence system. It was the kind of computer that took up a whole building, with rooms full of racks of thermionic valves (vacuum tubes).
Margaret Hamilton (who went on to work on the #Apollo guidance computer and actually invent software engineering as a practice) famously wrote the version of the SAGE software that got the best uptime. And the staff could tell because of the sound of the equipment: gentle clattering would progress through the system like waves on a shore, until a bug was encountered and the behaviour would sound chaotic and people would ring her up to diagnose the problem even before it crashed.
They preferred this to other people's code, which ALWAYS sounded chaotic. Hamilton has always described the chaotic behaviour of most software as the result of "programming after the fact": people start with unplanned messes, and then debug them until something works.
And the computers in those days had actual film cameras aimed at the consoles, with a clock and calendar in the shot. When the system crashed, it would snap a picture of the state of the machine so that everything could be entered into the log.
I don't know the origin story of this photo from the Computer History Museum, but that's Hamilton on the right, and the angle suggests that this was taken by a SAGE crash-camera (though it may have been manually triggered rather than by a fault/interrupt).
19 April was a Thursday in 1962, which is the year this photo is sometimes credited. 03:20 on the digital clock above suggests a late-night debugging session.
And yes that's an IBM console. People who worked on Whirlwind occasionally made comments like "That was when we convinced IBM that making computers was a good idea." In the 1950s, UNIVAC was what people thought of as "computers", and the systems they built after SAGE catapulted IBM into that level of reverence for decades.