bklaasen

TV news is curated for a particular effect; Why this story, and not that one?

It is a type of commercial entertainment. It it simultaneously inane and culturally violent. Here are people dying in an ongoing struggle for power between warlords and a corrupt government; here are professional athletes winning a tournament. Here's the weather forecast. These subjects merit approximately equal time and similar sentiment in tone. As a viewer of TV news, you are not empowered to change anything because you are not informed of any of the forces and complexities driving the violence and there is no call to action.

He'd have lost a toenail or two and might have a bit of callusing.

That's part of the system. Management is failing if it's not acknowledging and tackling this part of the system that's prepared to destroy the whole to preserve itself.

Yes, it made a racket! There is a description of the Harvard Mark I crashing in Beyer's "Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age":

> Hopper, Campbell, and Bloch invested substantial energy in developing practices and procedures for debugging. Like physicians, they identified symptoms, made diagnoses, and prescribed treatments. Sometimes symptoms were obvious, as when Mark I would come to a crashing halt: “The crash of that thing sounded as if a plane had run into the building,” Hopper recalled. ”You never heard such a crash in your life.”

Archive.ph version which loads promptly: https://archive.ph/jiER0

Terrific, thanks. That's new to me.

Laurent Bossavit's "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering"[1] is fun and accessible. It claims that much of what we consider fact in software engineering is actually folklore.

[1] https://leanpub.com/leprechauns/

Wonderful stuff. Gerald Weinberg had a huge influence on at least the 1990s generation of testers, with his ethnographic approach. He doesn't seem to have had as much influence on the same generation of programmers. Perhaps the techniques he described had already been internalised?

Dennis Geller is the author of Structured Programming in APL[2] and Tom Plum seems to have gone on to a career in writing books on C[3].

It looks like this film is just one part of a series, probably presenting approaches from Weinberg's early structured programming books[1].

I'd love to know where this gem was discovered and if the rest of the putative series still exists.

[1] https://www.geraldmweinberg.com/Bookstuff/Each_Book/Early_Bo... [2] https://books.google.ie/books/about/Structured_Programming_i... [3] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1420419.Thomas_Plum

...and the filename is shown as a focused highlight, leading you to think that's where the focus actually is! But no, it's in the search field, at the bottom right of the dialog.

No more "every fortnight in future". Instead, it's "biweekly going forward".

I do miss the 'old' terms.

There's a terrific episode about BEFLIX on the "Advent of Computing" podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6m1EPM2w1oX9aPoNyXa6Bb

For near-line stuff and long-term storage, a HP Microserver with software RAID5 array via Linux mdraid. No inbound access from outside the network. Powered on as necessary. I've replaced the entire disk array once so far, as the disks neared end-of-life.

For online, accessible-anywhere data, a largely geo-blocked self-hosted Nextcloud instance running on a Partaker mini PC, backed up nightly with restic to encrypted blobs on B2, which are browseable with the wonderful restic-browser.

> (my hips would need a day to recover from a 20 km walk). > > I'm in my mid 50s, so I'd like to believe my age is part of that.

Nah, it's just lack of practice. I turned fifty during my walk across Europe from Dublin to Istanbul. I'm 55 now and can happily cover 30 km every few months.

Try going for an extra ten or twenty minutes on your regular walk, and when that feels good, add another ten or twenty minutes. Keep going until you can knock out 30 km in a day's walk, with a break for lunch. Good luck, and enjoy it!

"Cailín" is Irish for "girl".

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/cail%C3%ADn

A film of the exhibition captures the multimedia aspect well: https://vimeo.com/721486048/description

(Via https://civilizationofllhuros.org/)

Alan Bromley and Doron Swade's rebuild of the Difference Engine, done using metals and techniques that were available in Babbage's time, seem to have put paid to that idea.

These days it's Babbage's poor project management that's cited as the cause. He had a stormy relationship with his engineer, and couldn't settle on a design long enough for it to be implemented.

A 65 page tract on programming as it relates to Bookchin's "social ecology" and Wikipedia-like "peer production".

No difference. Just a branding exercise.

Nextcloud will soon be at version 25, which will also be named Nextcloud Hub 3. Frank Karlitchek talks about this during the Q&A, about an hour and a half into the video linked below.

However there are major improvements coming in that new version, specifically to the Photos app[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhJXZzqsv8A&t=1103

The ARM binary isn't up yet.

``` $ uname -m aarch64 $ restic self-update writing restic to /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/restic find latest release of restic at GitHub latest version is 0.14.0 download SHA256SUMS download SHA256SUMS.asc GPG signature verification succeeded Fatal: unable to update restic: unable to find file with suffix android_arm64.bz2 ```

Don't you find the background rumble of the air in the vents very enervating? I was in a friend's place with a heat pump, and I felt like I was inside a badly tuned organ. Lots of atonal near-subsonic rumbling. I think heat pump vendors need to learn about acoustics: standing waves, reverberation, phase interference.

The former is a classic comedy. For a taste of what you're missing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U

I recall Flight Unlimited[1] made a big deal of their flight model which incorporated "real-time computational fluid dynamics". I'm not a pilot but I found it very compelling. It was groundbreaking for its time.

None of the rest of Looking Glass' flight sims used the first game's fluid dynamics model.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Unlimited

(2015)

Excellent, thank you! This also works in Mull, the "...privacy oriented and deblobbed web browser based on Mozilla technology." https://www.f-droid.org/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/

Datamation magazine? https://archive.org/details/pub_datamation

> A person can road trip in their car, truck, or van

> or upon a motorcycle, moped, or scooter.

Not quite the same thing; you're isolated from your environment by the noise and the cabin or the helmet. You won't hear the birdsong, the silence, the wind rustling in the trees. Much of the depth of the experience is in the total engagement with your environment from moment to moment.

> Few people have that kind of free time.

...if they're selling their labour in exchange for money. Do you need to spend quite as much as you do every fortnight? If you're not living from paycheck to paycheck, spend a couple of years saving and then take time off to do a big trip.

I did it during 2017; the mortgage payments continued and I lived on the rest. I had money left over at the end.

An example of a person falling for the ELIZA effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

"Dark Hero of the Information Age" is excellent.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211053.Dark_Hero_of_the_...

> Phil Karlton famously said, “There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things.”

...and off-by-one errors.