GarnetFloride

Something I have been doing is saving PDFs of interesting articles. I actually go back for some of them. Organization is always an issue but mostly desktop search finds it.

Fun fact: there are over 600 definitions of the word "run" and over 400 for "set". But yeah, English is really precise enough for programming.

How many times have we seen that there's been a spec for something and the programmers write something that is exactly like the spec said but was completely wrong?

I found that sea, space and automotive are the three most hostile environments, each with very different requirements that made it hard in different ways.

The story of Lindybeige who is just trying to do anything online after an attempt to change providers left him without a mobile phone that would allow him to authenticate.

In summary, our phones are now our biggest single point of failure.

I've read some very bad READMEs. I mean really bad, like not even tell me what the program is for bad. I remember one that forgot to tell me what its own name was.

But really this is basic usability testing. I still run into issue at work where its like "Oh, you need to install C# runtime" or some other thing so it can even start. We have since fixed the build chain to check for that.

I know its hard to step out of your own context but that is what documentation is.

There are over 600 definitions of the work "run" and over 400 for the word "set" and you really expect that some end user in another industry cares what your context is. It's our job to care about their context because they are paying us to solve their problem.

I can't find it at the moment, but I saw a study where they fed snakes different forms of beef. Raw chunk, raw chopped, raw ground, and cooked versions of the same. And they found the smaller the bits the more calories were available to the snake.

I’m only at chapter 4 but so far it’s asking What do you want to do? What are you actually doing? What can you change to start making those things line up better?

Structuring Life to Support Creativity By Sandra Tayler Only a short way into this but it is a really interesting toolbox for finding ways to figure out what's important to you and making space for creativity.

Master Alvin by Orson Scott Card Kinda impressed that he finished the series after 30 years. GRR Martin loses another excuse.

Had a cousin that was trying to use vape to get off of cigarettes, but it wasn't going well. The new plan was to move to the South grow tobacco.

I'm old enough to remember the Desktop Publishing revolution in the early 90s. There were so many awful posters, flyers and such that actual people made. My favorite was a preschool flyer where they used the kidnapper font.

So much of my time right now is completely rebuilding tutorials that the devs had generated because except for steps like open and save its just wrong and it doesn't work and customers are not going to let that slide.

I was in an employment group and a guy who was laid off from Workday joined and he did not at all realize just how bad the product was until he was on the other side.

Restores can be Very exciting. I worked tech support and got trained on an email server backup program. I was alone for my first call on the program.

Before I could finish the greeting I knew it was going to be a wild call as I could hear in the background someone shouting and someone sobbing, the guy actually on the phone sounded like he wasn't planning on making it home that night.

Turned out they were testing out some sync software and after a test they deleted the sync without turning off the app which then did its thing and now nobody could log in except admin who was the only user left.

I was able to find and confirm that the backups were in place and accessible. Which was good, I could hear them breathing again. But I had no way to get the restore going because the source server was so hosed.

Just then the dev walking by and I got him on the call and he did some outright hacker magic to get things to the point that a restore could function.

I thought about writing my notes into a troubleshooting guide but then realized it would be better to skip the hacking and make a setup guide that showed them how to set it up properly in the first place.

I like physical copies as they can't be remotely deleted, altered, or slapped full of ads.

I do enjoy a very limited number of hardcovers from my most favorite stories from my favorite authors. Great for curling up in bed with.

Paperback is fine, even in the trade paperback sizes now. Though some authors like Brandon Sanderson don't make novels but bookzillas, and I've thought more than once of getting used copies to split for easier carrying.

Isn't it like that old story about catching monkeys. You hollow out a gourd with a small hole, tack it to the ground and put a nut in it. The monkey can get its hand in but not out with the nut in their fist. The human can walk over and leisurely whack the monkey because the monkey can't let go.

They act just like drug addicts. More's the pity. They can change but they don't seem to understand that rock bottom is a tough place to be.

Baking eggless applesauce oatmeal cookies and chocolate chip cookies.

We saw it over the weekend and had a blast. There were a lot of easter eggs and cameos that we saw but we know we missed a fair number of them. Not enough to see it in theaters again but at home with freeze frame.

You could tell the people who made this movie really loved doing it. That's the real thing about it.

Its also commentary on corporate media, that the execs tried to kill it only tells on them.

are you kidding me? It's right in the preamble "promote the general welfare" if clean water does not count, then neither should all the other BS they've argued into existence over that phrase should either.

Sometimes you need to think outside the box, sometimes inside the box, and sometimes you need to think about the box itself.

Some people will tear down Chesterton's fence because they don't want to feel limited, others won't approach because they want to be safe. Few ask why it was put up in the first place.

With nothing but a piece of paper and a pencil you can draw an alley or start building an imaginary world.

Too many of us turn boundaries into chains to hold us down.

Civilization occurs when one person helps another who cannot help themselves. That's a simple definition, but it should suffice for this discussion.

Your original comment was what to do about those people whose labour does not equal or exceed the minimum wage value.

In everything I have read and all the people I have talked to about this, after sufficient questioning, the answer always seems to end up being murdering the poor. Oh, it's never going out and killing them personally. Oh no, that would be terrible, it's always destroy support systems and flooding the market with cheap but eventually deadly substances of varying sorts, so it's always at second hand.

Yet on the other hand I have seen so many companies damaged and even destroyed by someone whose economic value is extremely negative, but somehow spins it as a good thing and so walks away with big paychecks and fat bonuses and go on to another company to do it again.

I saw a PM so thoroughly mess up that they made it impossible for the company to provide software licenses to their customers. Managements response was not to fix the broken spreadsheet, oh no, that would be the smart thing to do. No, it was to lay people off because revenue was down. It was like selling cars but never giving the customer the keys to drive off. Who would actually finish the transaction?

But hey, he's are an executive, so it's fine when he destroys tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of customer revenue. Now, that teenage girl trying to feed, house and transport herself, now she deserves to have her every action, interaction and off-duty thought scrutinized at the nano level because how dare she want to live a life worth living when her parents aren't already rich?

I remember when a fast-food place was staffed with a dozen people and the food was good and was actually delivered quickly. Now it's just a couple and it takes forever to get through the drive-thru to get food that poisons you. At least corporate is posting record profits again.

It's not that the girl at the drive-thru isn't generating huge profits, she and all of them very much are. It's that someone else has decided that she doesn't deserve to participate in the rewards of those profits.

I always get the feel that they are so disappointed that slavery is mostly illegal. So many systems have been put in place to suck all the money off the table so it becomes more and more expensive to survive, minimum wage was an attempt to protect people, that is what a functional civilization does.

So back to civilization, people come together to share resources, so people can support each other. Some people think they are special. They treat people as things and that is the problem. When people are things, they become disposable, and that is wrong.

"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." -A Christmas Carol (1843)

The whole point of civilization is to help people.

If a business cannot support civilization, then why should it continue to exist?

Picked up by Apple, of all places, and Brandon finished the first draft of the screenplay last week.

I use Mortimer's system for non-fiction works, which is where it makes the most sense.

I would also use it if I was doing a really deep dive in a fiction work.

For most fiction that I am reading for entertainment, the first 50ish pages will tell me if its worth finishing.

Now we just need something to replace paper for a whole new rock-paper-scissors paradigm.

So many things are like that. Trying to bolt on accessibility or security as an afterthought never work as well as making those things part of the initial design.

I've been at this long enough that yes I know that just getting something out the door so we can make money is important.

But this just creates another kind of technical debt that comes back to bite you.

WordStar was great once you had the keycombos memorized.

WordPerfect was great for doing lots of formatting it was so easy to make a signature for printing a booklet or zine.

I've been using Scrivener as my creating space. It is great at taking down words and organizing research. It just does RTF which is completely fine for my needs, but it is not a word processor or page layout program but that is not what it needs to do.

I'd rather use Word (ugh) or InDesign for layout. Separating the data from the display keeps things focused on what's important at the time.

You can't look at the total acreage of the state as a metric when 64.4% of the state is owned by the federal government.

The proposed site is twice the size of Manhattan, NY and sized for 9GW of energy which is more than the entire state uses yearly. We literally do not have the water to support a data center that huge.

They just enacted a fireworks ban because the weather people just had to create a whole new category for how dry and dangerous it is. Air quality is a constant problem because all the pollution from regions West of Utah collect right against the mountains. A few years ago we woke up to what looked like heavy fog, but it was smoke --from Siberia.

Wasn't there a case of a F-150 running over a Lamborghini in a parking lot a few weeks ago, because the driver of the pickup couldn't see the supercar?

But, but, they're digital natives, oh course they know all about computers. /s

I get that. I used to be able to overhaul a VW beetle on the side of the road with regular tools. A couple of years ago my car's transmission's computer went out on the interstate. I couldn't even get a useful error code. The shop down the street didn't have a high enough end device to talk to it. While the dealer was able to figure it out; it took nearly a month to get the replacement part. I'm car semi-literate.