ChainOfFools

"I may add that I did not enjoy the short time I spent in the company [Wallie] commanded.

He could never grasp the neighbourly principles which, by the tacit agreement of the troops, were held to govern trench-warfare, and to which I was introduced at once by my sergeant:

I had suggested "pooping" a rifle grenade into a German post where we had seen heads moving.

"Just as 'ee like, zir," said the sergeant, scratching his head, "but once 'ee start doing that kind of thing, 'ee'll get zummit back, zee?"

-CS Lewis, from Surprised by Joy (1948)

> it's more apparent than ever nobody has anything interesting to say,

Krugman's observation, so often maligned and mocked for the past 20 years, to the effect that he was ignorantly claiming to have seen through something he had not even seen, is starting to look more and more prescient:

'The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! '

I believe all of the colors of butterfly wings, and of all feathered animals are produced in the same way? I've always assumed that "simulation" has a local definition in the study of biological color reproduction, where light interactions with ultra fine structure at the atomic level is the default, or perhaps maybe on the time scale of evolution, the oldest means of reproducing color.

Contrast this witb a much coarser structural phenomenon manifesting at a level much closer to macroscopic is thus considered to be a "cheaper" simulation of that effect, in order to derive its same selective benefits but with less of a radical genetic shift required for the production of the right proteins etc.

A big contributor to the problem is that the word conspiracy has become too broad to be useful as a test or label anymore.

Everything novel in the world arises as a result of a recursively self-propagating memetic function, one that could be characterized in its earliest phases as a conspiracy: namely that one, two, and then a handful of people settle on a common notion about something universal that needs to change, whether it's for the good or the bad of everyone else, and when successful that idea fans out memetically to others so that it accumulates the necessary physical mass and force required to cause real change.

By the time the impact of this force hits people who have no connection or even awareness of the original initiating group, it feels entirely exogenous and a search for the conspirators, those who triggered the initiation of this wave, is an understandable response especially if the change is unwanted.

As a recent example, one of the cleverest bits of social engineering in the Bitcoin project was the possibly intentional disappearance of its pseudonymous founder, conveniently removing the ability of those so exogenously impacted to identify the origin of the change with any particular individual, greatly complicating accusations of conspiracy. A much earlier example, curiously similar in form, is the origin story of the traditional founder of alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus, to whom was even ascribed authorship of that movements own founding "white paper," called the Emerald Tablet.

Exactly what I was thinking of with respect to kludges necessary for backwards compatibility.

I think Commodore made one monitor that supported a bi-modal scan rate, and it was something like twice as expensive as the the regular Amiga monitor range. I also recall a somewhat exotic NEC 17" flat-face CRT monitor that was completely out of the question pricewise for almost anybody except institutions, that also could do it by virtue of having a continuously variable sync clock from 15 khz up to 45 or so.

How much of this issue (specifically affecting the spaceflight project), if any, do you think was instigated from talent being lured away?

got my vote! Except maybe the jail part, but I know you're probably being a little bit hyperbolic

I'm starting to see more and more homes in the area where I live, Southern California in the LA region, switching from green unsustainable lawns to some form of hardscape/ xeriscaping.

one of the rising trends is the use of old tires as a ground cover source. These have been shredded and processed with a small amount of coloring into something that very strikingly resembles and spreads like wood chips until you pick them up and feel them in your hands.

Of course it better solution would be to not have tires that are so toxic to begin with, but there are very few products into which the most unusable kinds of recyclable plastic streams can be fed, and tires are one of them.

As an avid recreational cyclist, I would much rather be active on a bike in Sweden in the winter time, then in virtually anywhere in the USA's south east or southwest, and even in the northeast, during the summertime. I'll still do it because I like riding, but I would never want to have to ride anywhere for any exertion-inducing length of time outside of a purely recreational scenario. I will be completely soaked and that's awful for everybody involved.

Well it can be both can't it.

Car makers, conceding that they have to incorporate some sort of non-startle noise if they're building an ev, decide to lean into it and pretty soon the pr and marketing departments are trying to come up with the most "distinctive" non-startle branding sound possible, and we're off to the juvenile arms race of noise making one-upsmanship again.

The people were talking about are slapping shitty cat deleted straight pipe exhausts on what are typically engineered to be economy or family cars, or small displacement motorcycle engines. People who don't see the offensively selfish stupidity in tripling or quadrupling the noise output of their mode of transportation just to get an extra 10% power, if that.

They're not running million dollar F1 cars around closed environments dedicated to the purpose.

Unfortunately idiots who will run the mower over their own cord, or absent minded who consistently forget to plug the thing in to charge it, also exist.

And more neutrally there is a certain laudable economy in not throwing away a perfectly functional lawn mower just because it's become a relative nuisance as the options around that have become better over time. The lawn mower equivalent of wanting to drive a car until the wheels fall off because why trash a perfectly functional car when so many people don't even have that.

Finally there are other people who actually enjoy the petty power thrill that comes with being able to make all of their neighbors endure the harsh grating drone of a 2 stroke engine, the kind of person who doesn't see the problem with suggesting other people should wear earplugs in their own homes when he's mowing his lawn, (there's a number of this type in this very comment section doing the same for cars) and because there is a flimsy but historically normalized justification for it -before electric mowers appeared on the market, everyone else with lawns to cut had to be equally guilty of making a comparable racket willing or not- they get away with it as there's no straightforward legal argument that isolates exactly why what they're doing is a net harm to the quality of life of all their neighbors.

This is the point that makes all of the miserable noise pollution from modified cars so much more grating, knowing that whatever is making excess noise means potentially useful (in a performance sense) power is escaping as sound somewhere in their drivetrain, so insofar as their objective is to make their vehicles loud for the sake of loud, these people are achieving the opposite of what they're trying to signal they're achieving.

Not soon enough, and even though I'm a parent frankly it's for my own sanity as much as for that of my kids.

I have no sympathy, in fact negative sympathy shading into election year issue territory, for the small but growing minority who feel entitled to make all us living in a quarter mile radius of their incredibly irrelevant presense get rudely disrupted by their deliberately obnoxious ear-splitting noise machine, _inside our own homes_ when trying to take a nap, have a conversation, read a story or do anything at a normal indoor volume. Why is society decided to accept this Behavior in a way that they would never accept, say, someone marching down the street tossing firecrackers into the air at all hours of the day?

The answer is simply that it's too impractical to catch and penalize people who get a petty sadistic power thrill out of their consequence-free enshittification the ambient public space.

I welcome the growing use of noise maps as evaluation layers in the real estate and rental markets, only by putting hard numbers on the degradation of value that this causes, particularly for homeowners, will any measures with actual teeth be implemented to push back on it.

Wait till they find out about the Human Fund

> chatgpt is now the default tool for the vast majority of people writing these papers.

I'm in a similar sort of circle and I can say that this, though I've not measured rigorously, does strongly square with my own anecdotal experience, and it's especially prevalent with people whose first language is not English but have no choice but to publish (frequently) and apply for grants in English.

So many of the writing assistant tools customarily used for first-pass proofreading have gone straight into full LLM integration and no longer simply just check grammar and basic "elements of style" issues.

Also professional (human) proofreaders are fantastically expensive for the very limited amount of assistance date provide. A couple thousand dollars more (source for this number, a proofreader recommended by Oxford U Pub) for someone to fix some minor semantic redundancies in your 35 page book chapter wording is financially unreasonable for a lot of people in academia.

As would 97% of all conversations, if people had the patience, curiosity, and lack of anything immediately productive to do.

I was also curious about this. a bunch of BASE jumping hats dropping off a building is exactly the sort of project I would momentarily think about doing and never seriously entertain due to being certain that sooner or later someone, somewhere is going to sue me for some marginally harm-like side effect.

Or use lasers and tiny gum-shaped smoke bombs to sample and model the local air column currents, pre soften and flatten a portion of the gum paper-thin with some sort of wettimg/rolling assembly, stage, then let it drop and form its own miniature gum parachute or replica of one of those whirling propeller seeds that have a built-in wing to slow their fall.

Why does this remind me of something out of a certain old point and click adventure game, it was one that had the verb USE apply to every type of action.

click>(GUM)

click>(SELF)

click>(USE)

"You used the GUM on yourself.

Nothing special happens.

You now have 0 GUM."

There was another game in the same genre that did the same, but with the verb OPERATE. As teenagers my friends and I used to laugh way too much at dialogue responses these games would craft, where you would get things like "OPERATE GUM on SELF"

Any resolution with 400 pixel vertical scan on the Amiga was interlaced, no exceptions until too many years after the first OCS and ECS chipsets released.

and when the solutions did come they were burdoned by kludges necessary so as not to break backwards compatibility - and especially not to complicate life for the killer app of the platform at the non-gaming level, the video toaster, which was very tightly integrated with the Amigas interlaced video system.

You're technically correct but I think rather missing the point. I got the scale wrong (guessed at the tolerances involved rather than looking them up), but obviously resolving a mechanical position to meet the actual tolerances is already a solved problem by current voice coil systems. A simplified version of the same mechanism could be applied to the line-of-heads solution I'm suggesting, considering that in both cases a comparable reciprocal mass is being moved back and forth, but in the scenario I'm proposing it would only need to be moved a millimeter (or two, or one, or a micron - all are far smaller of a movement than the comparatively huge arc swept by current head designs)

Whatever subdivisions within that bounding range are necessary to achieve equivalent (or superior) accuracy to flying head designs has already been proven to work in spite of the current designs' much more complicated and delicate arrangement.

They could also be staggered in tiers, one row offset from the other.

I feel like there's an alternate universe where this is exactly the design that was adopted and someone is out there suggesting our universe's setup instead, asking why not make a single read-write head that gets whipped back and forth around at mind numbing speeds seeking to different spots on the surface of the platter, and everyone's pointing out how absurdly bad and pointless an idea that would be: think about how delicate such a setup is, you want to put a flying bit of metal over a rotating metallic surface at just a microscopic distance apart - you want to rely on the Bernoulli effect to pull it into just the right proximity to the surface, and this has to work in every possible temperature, vibration, and moisture and air pressure scenario? how do you compensate for inevitable wear and tear on the mechanism in the drift and loss of precision that will induce, what about all of the fine particulates that may develop from friction over time, how do you get lubricants to last so long, all the possibilities for terminal head crashes, how slow mechanical mechanisms are versus solid state, the comparatively massive additional power draw and heat this would introduce, and so on.

Without knowing anything about the specifics of material engineering whatsoever in this domain, my assumption is that Manufacturing the read-write heads maybe one of the most expensive technical challenges and perhaps a disproportionately large factor in the cost of the entire assembly, so perhaps asking for an entire strip of these things might be like ignorantly asking, if the light-refracting feature of a diamond is the most salient feature of a diamond ring, why not make a rings with diamonds all the way around instead of just one.

I used to be (and still am) one of the biggest Amiga fans anyone is likely to encounter, but I have to concede that the Amiga's graphics architecture was ergonomically terrible for the vast majority of dtp work. Most people found working in the only native resolution really suitable for dtp, interlaced 640x400, to be intolerable to look at for even mildly extended periods of time. Things were even worse in europe, with the lower 50/25ihz vertical scan rates. The non-interlaced modes otoh had too low of a vertical resolution and the pixels were far too oversquare or rectangular to render many fonts accurately.

It took far too long to come up with effective solutions for this, and the ones that did exist, like the A2024 grayscale square-ish megapixel pixel display, noninterlaced, were too late and had too many compromises.

The Amiga had an uphill battle against the head start mac enjoyed ( and seemed, to the casual observer, rather naturally suited to with its crisp black and white display) in DTP to begin with, and without a native laser printing, a good scanning solution, enforcdd UI consistency through quickdraw and most of all adobe, there was never a reasonable chance that it would seriously challenge Apple in that market.

The unsuitability of a very visibly interlaced display to fine detail black and white layout work insured it would never be tolerated by people who had to work with such tools 8 hours a day.

Totally agree about the absence of a pennies per unit midi port as being a damnable error on Commodore's part; likely one of the main reasons the non-pc market was fatally fragmented three ways instead of a possibly manageable two, and gifting the ST (which was in all other respects an admirable me-too effort at best), a lifeline by which wedge itself into the nascent multimedia production market, which really would have been better off entirely associated with one or two platforms rather than two/three.

And probably the biggest "like living in the future" advantage out of all, true preemptive multitasking. However with the major Achilles heel of no memory protection; message passing done through pointer exchange was wonderful for insanely fast lightweight contact switching but terrible for system stability.

Knowing that ambidextrous thus means "both right (hands)" makes me marvel at how such a brazenly politically incorrect figure of speech has for so long remained undetected by the cultural police thanks to a linguistic camoflauge that mimics medical-sounding jargon.

Another thing I was always curious about is why swing-arm actuators stuck around all these years, rather than moving to a single fixed rail with a strip of individually addressable read regions, and another rail separate (and upstream) from this with write capability).

No more mechanical actuation at all, eliminating a huge amount of complicated precision machined componentry as well as the voice coil itself.

Mounting this fixed rail to multiple structural points inside the case means there would be zero possibility of a head crash.

No cross interference or mode switching between reading and writing. The entire region passing under the rail can be scanned simultaneously, or if it's not possible to manufacture such a sensor at a data density to match the drive platter then perhaps the rail could shift a millimetre or so back and forth to allow micron-fine positioning from a milimeter-course array of heads. Much less mass to move, likely simplifies the math needed to meet the data in flight, and reduces the total reciprocating moment to a single linear axis solution.

I know I can't be the only person, nor the 1st, to have considered this idea. I suspect multiple variations may be lurking in the patent portfolios of the big storage mfrs. But I would love to know why nothing resembling it has ever been tried in production over the 30 or 40 something years that hard drives have been mass commoditized.

When I first heard about how mechanical hard drives work, back in the days when the highest end 300 MB (yes MB) drives ran a stack of four or six platters, and some drives still used a sort of rack and pinion positioning setup rather than a voice coil, I assumed each platter would have its own actuator and heads were only paired up top and bottom per platter.

I was surprised to find that instead, the entire rack of them moved as a single unit, with so much energy wasted overcoming 3 or 4 times the necessary inertial mass for each seek. So now, 20 something years later, well after SSDs have come close to superceding spinning rust when all tradeoffs and variables are considered together, someone has finally gotten around to putting an extra actuator in these units. Great!

While on that subject I also never understood why the general layout of components inside these drives never iterated away from the very earliest RLL / MFM winchester mechanisms, with the spinning platter assembly slightly off-center in the case, and a single head assembly off in one corner.

I assumed at some point that the armature assembly would become miniaturized just enough to allow centering the platter spindle and adding another set of heads at the opposite corner of the case, so that each head set could address opposite sides of the platter, effectively halving access times even on single platter drives.

After decades of doing this I have finally come to my senses and now only engage in arguments of this form where I could add a stage 0: buy leveraged options on my unpopular but obvious observation, and a stage 6: wildly profit from betting against the stubbornness and dismissiveness of such people as I had previously tried to persuade and bring into an equally advantaged perspective with my own.

I increasingly prefer to simply sit out stages 1 through 5 altogether.

> >you can't make coffee cup rides not sickening by software.

> Plainly false.

I'm not sure how this is false, but I'm also not sure what the person you're replying to is getting at. coffee cup rides have no driver and therefore no look ahead path planning at all.

The entire appeal of these rides is that they exaggerate perception of third and higher derivatives by deliberately creating a chaotic field of view for their occupants, combined with constantly changing both the rate and direction of the acceleration of their squishy bodies in the rigid capsules to which they are loosely secured.

Smoothing this out with software would be possible, sure, but then the result would no longer be a coffee cup ride. I feel like this is a poorly formed example.