@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

nosrednayduj

@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io

Programmer, been on the information superhighway since it was a goat track. Bicyclist, electric car owner, waterskier, board gamer, generic nerd. Cat lover, square dancer, parent, SFF reader.

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thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

TFW you discover you prepped an absolute banger post in another window and never hit Publish and now it's too out of date

nosrednayduj,
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs I fondly recall the UNIX-haters mailing list, which had this rule to reduce mailing list volume: "when considering a reply, ask yourself, will this response be appropriate next week? If so, post it next week. If not, it is not appropriate now."

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Wonder how long it will take for “to google something” to disappear from the language…

…or maybe it will take up a meaning of “utterly destroying a useful thing for sheer greed”.

nosrednayduj,
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs Unfortunately, "duckduckgo" as a verb doesn't fall trippingly off the tongue...

nosrednayduj, to random
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

Ready for mailing!

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Is my iPad Pro from 2016 retrocomputing now

nosrednayduj,
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs my ipad 4 mini apparently is - I couldn’t install the delta airlines app! Said it needs ios 16 and apparently 15 is all I can get.

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Finally true innovation by ditching the concept of...

...checks notes...

...making new vehicles as a car company.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/04/tesla-to-lay-off-everyone-working-on-superchargers-new-vehicles/

nosrednayduj,
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs Seems like my 2015 model S is pretty much peak Tesla. The steering wheel is round, it has an FM radio, while it has some driver assist, it's all optional, so it lets you control where you're going if you so choose, so you don't back into a pond and sink. Seems like newer models are worse in most ways! So maybe it's a good idea to lay off the team!

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

I don’t understand how Teslas are still legal when people keep dying because they can’t open the doors when power is lost.

(You can open them, but it’s a non-obvious multi-step process that requires reading the manual.)

nosrednayduj,
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs Issue with Tesla manual: It's on the touch screen. I guess I could try to download and print it? But then it would be out of date next software update!

"I bought it before we knew how bad he is" 🙂 (Also, I have a 2015 model S which has more physical controls than a 3 or Y - or apparently a newer S.)

thomasfuchs, (edited ) to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

This coloring book for adults fad has gone too far

nosrednayduj,
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs Hey! I learned Fortran from that book in 1981!

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

I’m surprised by how many people think VR isn’t a hype technology after tech industry having tried for 40 years* to make it mainstream (and it really isn’t).

VPL was founded in 1984

nosrednayduj,
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@screwtape @thomasfuchs But #LambdaMOO was not founded until 1990.

nosrednayduj,
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@screwtape @thomasfuchs The language was created only a year or so before.

nosrednayduj, to random
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

Gave at the this afternoon.

mttaggart, to random

Do you think gas stoves are "better" for cooking?

Are you sure you know why you think that? www.npr.org/2023/10/17/1183551603/gas-stove-utility-tobacco

nosrednayduj,
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@http_error_418 @sangster @mttaggart @mekkaokereke I've been using electric stoves for so long that it turns out some of my recipes depend on the "slow to cool off" factor. I was surprised when I tried making something on a gas stove, and it didn't cook at all like I expected it to. I suppose I'll have the same trouble with induction.

nosrednayduj, to boardgames
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

Stopped at a yard sale because I saw they had . Mostly Monopoly Jr. and Battleship type things, but nestled in among them was Forbidden Island. And also "Spot It", which I have enjoyed in the past. The homeowner came up to me and said "everything here is free", and I said "even Forbidden Island? That's a real game." I mean, it plays identically to Pandemic, so if you have Pandemic, it's not really a new game to you. She said, "we've never played it, please take it." So I did!

timbray, to random
@timbray@cosocial.ca avatar

Assuming the world is somewhat consistent, I conclude that vampires don’t show up on the selfie cam.

nosrednayduj,
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@timbray one author, I think Faith Hunter, posits that it’s the silver in film that makes them invisible. So her vampires show in electronic photos!

timbray, to random
@timbray@cosocial.ca avatar

Suppose you’re generally progressive/left-ish (like me) and are a hyperoverprivileged white male techbro boomer (like me). Your social-media stream is going to be full of angry people attacking various aspects of what you are. So I wrote a piece about owning your privilege and sucking it up: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2023/10/07/Suck-it-up

nosrednayduj,
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@timbray Nice essay. I fit in all but one of those privileged boxes, and I am also aware of the advantages that I have as a result. I try to spend some of my money around usefully.

nosrednayduj, to random
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

I recently discovered https://bird.makeup/ and I was excited to be able to follow some people I've been missing who have not migrated to mastodon. But now I wonder if I am subverting mastodon, and should not be using it?

thomasfuchs, (edited ) to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

PSA: This morning (10/14) there is an annular solar eclipse visible from many parts of the US.

⚠️DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN WITHOUT PROPER PROTECTION.⚠️

During an annular eclipse, at NO TIME is it safe to look at the sun without specially manufactured solar viewing film or filters. (No, you can’t make one with household materials. No, aluminum foil or sunglasses don’t work.)

A simple alternative: a pinhole projector (you just need some cardboard, or even just your fingers): https://eclipse.aas.org/eye-safety/projection

nosrednayduj,
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs My favorite partial eclipse viewing technique is with a colander to make a million pinhole cameras. It's best if you have an unwrinkled sheet of paper to project onto.

ai6yr, to random
@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org avatar

If you humans all don't start behaving, I'm going to tell the moon to eat the sun tomorrow! 🤪

nosrednayduj,
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@ai6yr The moon's not going to do a very good job of it tomorrow, though. Just wait til April 8 though! Then it'll chomp but good!

nosrednayduj, to random
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@feoh was talking about old-style disk and head crashes, and I had to take a picture of my art. It's leaning against a window at the moment and so is not very easy to take a picture of, so I have given it a better background for this.

I think 1981 was the time that my data was on this disk drive. Tops 20 PDP 10, but I don't know any details about the type of drive. It looked like a washing machine, top loading. And you put this cover thing in and turned something to put the pack in or out.

lauren, to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

When I was an undergrad at UCLA, I already had advanced access to both the Campus Computing Network's (CCN) IBM 360/91 and the UCLA home-grown URSA high speed terminal system (which displayed full pages at a time on modified TVs, with 40 character lines -- two lines equals one punched card image!)

I was also already deeply involved in ARPANET and its very advanced hardware and systems at the first ARPANET site in UCLA's Boelter Hall. But that was a totally different world, and frankly we didn't talk about it much outside the lab since anti-government sentiments were running quite high during that time. Even the mere existence of the lab was not generally known to most people on campus.

Still, I had to take some required courses, including, yes, an introductory programming class! So basically, I was leading a double life as far as this stuff was concerned.

The vast majority of students and faculty at that time submitted their programs as batch jobs on punched cards to the 91 (there was some limited TSO Timesharing, APL, and a couple of Tektronix graphics displays, etc. hooked up to the 91 as well) -- most students and faculty never saw this stuff -- they submitted card decks and got printouts in return later (sometimes much later if the 91 went down, as it often did).

Anyway, so I had turn in these rudimentary PL/C programs even while I was doing all that ARPANET stuff. A very weird time.

The programs had to be turned in as printed source code and output listings along with their card decks. This presented a problem. I didn't want to spend hours around the hot, sweaty, rather disgusting CCN keypunch room to manually punch out decks, after waiting for an 029 to even become available.

So I had another way.

Using my URSA access (in a small, private, hidden math department terminal room), I wrote my programs on the URSA CRT displays, directly submitted them from URSA for execution and to generate printed listings, and then sent the source code to the 91's automatic card punch. Then I could just pick up the decks! Very cool.

But there was another problem. The 91 punched the cards, but did not print on them. So they were blank punched cards with no printing at the top of what was punched. I certainly couldn't turn those in like that.

There was a solution.

A couple of the 029 keypunches in that awful room were the special "interpretive" model. This meant you could load a fully punched deck and then set the unit to run them through fairly rapidly automatically, and the unit would print at the top of each card what the punched card punches contained.

The result was a perfectly ordinary looking deck to turn in.

One evening I was doing just that. Cards were automatically feeding, running across and getting printed, and being stacked up on the other side. I just wandered around the halls while this was going on, visiting the vending machines and the like.

When I returned to check on progress one of these times, I found a girl who was in my same programming class standing at the keypunch staring at the cards running through automatically.

"What is happening?" she asked in confusion.

I wasn't in a great mood that evening, so admittedly I was a bit less than gallant.

"Oh, I rigged the keypunch to do my programming for me automatically," I replied.

She looked stunned and hurriedly departed, while the cards continued to plow through the machine.

Just another day at UCLA, long ago. -L

nosrednayduj,
@nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

@lauren @briansullivan Don't forget WAITS which ran at Stanford AI lab. "Wise-Ass ITS" was one expansion of the acronym, I don't remember what the official one was!

miona, to random
@miona@c.im avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    nosrednayduj,
    @nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

    @miona Decades ago I was a member of the mailing list. There was a rule: if you want to send a reply to a message, think about whether your response will be appropriate next week. If not, it is not appropriate now. If so, send it next week!

    It did a remarkably good job of keeping the messages on topic and high quality.

    timbray, to random
    @timbray@cosocial.ca avatar

    Got two problems with my Fedi feed: A little too quiet sometimes, and way too male. (So is the Internet.)

    So, for the moment here’s what I’m doing: Every day or so I hit my “notifications” tab and follow anyone there who presents as female. (Yes, I look at boosts too, but that’s not helping enough.)

    Let’s see how it works.

    nosrednayduj,
    @nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

    @timbray Sure, I'll bite. I don't post a lot, though.

    clive, to random
    @clive@saturation.social avatar

    "Strava, the World's Sweetest Social Network"

    Basically it's a place where people post about their exercise and other people shout encouragement

    And the scale of one's exercise barely matters

    If you move your butt at all, people are in there hitting the "like" button and going all wooooo

    Honestly an incredibly refreshing social space online

    My essay: https://clivethompson.medium.com/strava-the-worlds-sweetest-social-network-377f16dcb0d5

    A free "friend" link in case you're not a subscriber to Medium: https://clivethompson.medium.com/strava-the-worlds-sweetest-social-network-377f16dcb0d5?sk=4d56688371240145ca66477d99158601

    nosrednayduj,
    @nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

    @clive Interesting. I had a co-worker who is massively into bicycling. I am fairly seriously into bicycling. He is much faster than me. He was always on Strava, getting "king of the hill" for various segments. That caused me to AVOID Strava. I did not want to be the absolute worst in the list!

    nosrednayduj, to random
    @nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

    Traveling, nobody else masking. I don't think I'm in the top 1 out of 10,000 people who care about ; I'm probably in the top 1% of those. But I'm also in the top 1% of "not caring if people think I'm a dork" so that combination gives the proportion seen. I think fear of looking like a dork is causing a lot of people to stop being cautious when they'd prefer caution.

    feoh, to random

    So it's just my opinion but I think this 'verification' feature for Masto is too cool for school :) if you own a website of any kind, just paste the <a> tag they give you in and you're verified.

    Hat tip to @cassidy for signposting this!

    https://joinmastodon.org/verification

    nosrednayduj,
    @nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

    @feoh @cassidy But it only works with https sites. Certificates are a pain in the neck.

    feoh, to random

    @Byte I love the nickname! :)

    I have a question though: How many bits are you?

    People forget there haven't always been just 8 :)

    nosrednayduj,
    @nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io avatar

    @feoh @Byte PDP-10 assembly language is massively cool. All those half word operations. So you made me waste some time, finding the instruction manual online, and seeing if I could read the example code, which is "not really". It's been a while…

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