cmpalmer52

I once had a project to turn a customer’s Excel VBA application into a real application (I used ASP.Net). He had been hacking on this Excel spreadsheet for like 15 years. Once I printed the VBA code because it was hard to navigate and it was like 250+ pages printed out rather compactly.

The worse part wasn’t the code itself (although it was bad), but the fact that there was so much abandoned paths in it and there would be three or more different versions of crucial functions with the same name (or sometimes a different name but doing the same thing) in different places and sometimes all being called by different paths in the workflow. Or not being called at all.

And it was very math heavy (calculating natural gas pressures and flow rates through different sized pipes and fittings and sizing regulators to meet certain loads). Think Excel formulas on cells that referenced 15-20 other cells, each of which was a formula on their own that referenced other pages and cells, some of which were filled by VBA. And that wasn’t even involving the VBA code full of brute force solvers for multi-variable equations that used heuristics he’d worked out by trial and error (if it’s a delta over 1.5, add 5 to this variable, otherwise subtract 3, but if the delta was less than 0.5, add 1 and so on - it eventually converged or found no solution, but a binary solved did the same thing, only faster and easier).

It took me and a junior developer several months, during which, of course, multiple change requests were going through to make it multiuser and secure.

Both my nightmare project and one that I’m very proud of once it was completed.

I’ve worked for two companies that had ESOPs while they were privately traded. In both cases, the companies were sold to larger corporate entities that promptly got rid of the ESOP.

Not that it is all that bad. One sale happened after I left the company. The sale of the company included the shares owned by employees through the ESOP. So for one sale, I got several tens of thousands of dollars (hadn’t been part of the ESOP that long) and the other company’s sale gave me about 150% of my current salary. Both went right into retirement accounts to defer taxes.

The mood or “culture” was better, I think, during the ESOP period. Certainly cost saving was more on everyone’s mind, because every company dollar unspent was part of the profit and increased the valuation.

“Take a right at the next light. This might be a good time to roll up windows and lock your doors. And/or, if so equipped, lock and load.”

Not psychoactive until you heat it (vape or smoking it), then it decarbolyzes (sp?) to THC D9. That’s true even in dispensary grade and the reason you can just eat it directly and get high.

There’s a relevant discussion here: https://www.rocketryforum.com/threads/guidance-control-now-l...

Apparently it’s okay as long as it’s vertical and not intended to aim at a target or deliberately leave the flying area?

Needle in a haystack when you’ve opened and closed several hundred tabs and you’re trying to find some random fact you ran across a week or two ago.

This is specifically something some coworkers and I were discussing the other day. Someone said, “I want to ask it where I read an article about (some topic) last week.” or “I remember seeing that when I was researching something else. I wish I’d saved the URL.”

So I’m on board, if just for browser use (as long as it exclude private browsing, of course).

They need one for .NET MAUI. Copilot does a poor job helping with our port from Xamarin. “Maui is in pre-release at the time of training, so check the official documentation.” I’ve seen that several times on CoPilot and the JetBrains Rider AI.

That was it. We squeezed every trick out of that thing.

Yes, you are correct.

Around 1987/88, I was finishing college and worked at a copy/print/desktop publishing business. We had, IIRC, Mac SE 30s with Radius full page displays and several laser printers (in addition to high volume duplexing copiers and a deal with a full print shop for larger runs).

Adobe PageMaker and Illustrator were the workhorses. I did the design and layout for newsletters, posters, business cards, menus, invitations, resumes, or whatever someone wanted.

The real kludge was the scanner we had on the Macs. It replaced the print head on an ImageWriter II dot matrix printer. You fed it what you wanted to scan and it “printed” over it, scanning it at 72 dpi, which wouldn’t pick up much detail. So we would blow up images on the copier, scan the large pictures, trace it into an EPS file in Illustrator, then use it for the client’s materials.

My speciality was turning Polaroid photos of gas stations/convenience stores into architectural style line drawings for a firm that did graphics and signage. Photo -> blow up on copier -> scan in multiple parts into grainy BW scans -> tile the pieces back together -> trace in Illustrator. They would then take my 11”x17” black and white line drawings and their designer would color them and introduce the proposed graphics. As time consuming as it was, it saved them money to hire us to do it and the results were pretty impressive - particularly since my artistic skills were minimal.

Yeah, I struggle some days to get my AI assistant to produce useful code for medium to hard problems. On the other hand, if I say “Write a Python program to recursively search through our code files and find or change something,” it will work 95% of the time.

My favorite AI success story was a module of c# code that did text overlays on photos. It was written by hand. When we started encountering some issues with the graphics package it was using, I asked the AI (JetBrains in this case) to rewrite the module using a different package. Tedious but relatively straightforward and the results were correct first try. That was what convinced me that (eventually) these type of tools will be great.

Meanwhile, I’m so sick of seeing “my apologies, I misunderstood your request…” after it generates suggestions with non-existent methods, bad logic, or missing parameters.

My first professional software development job was circa 1982-83. I was in high school, working part time for my step-brother. He’d just got a luggable PC like the one in the picture and he paid me like $20 to write a MS-BASIC program to calculate payroll withholdings.

I’m about to try it in VR. I’ve gotten over most of my VR nausea, but I will say, the original Decent series games gave made me nauseated/gave me vertigo and headaches if I played them too much. Therefore, I am a little worried.

So much fun, though!

I went from a moderate fiscally conservative libertarian to a pretty far left liberal as I got older. Now I’m 57 and my conservative friends (the ones I still have), jokingly call me “Comrade”. It’s the opposite course from most of them, who got more conservative as they got older.

About 20 years into my career, I wrote a tracing system for three phase electrical utility networks to help manage and predict outages and their impact. Basically, each phase was a dendritic n-tree with the phases superimposed on each other because of the way the transmission lines were drawn in GIS (where a three phase line with ground was usually represented as a single line feature with attributes designating which phases were present).

So my solution was to turn each phase’s graph into a binary tree by converting the n-tree to a b-tree where each node has a parent, a child, and a sibling to make traversal easy. Then I gathered all of the nodes into a single ordered array of structs and used array indices to reference parent, child, sibling for each phase.

To trace up, you selecting the starting node and the phase and it would walk up the graph to a source or you could specify a source node and transverse down by phases to create a downstream trace showing all affected customers.

Each node also had protective devices, like fuses and switches, that could be activated/deactivated or predicted as sources of outages.

At the time, I could downstream trace to every customer of a substation in a second or less when most GIS based network traces took 10-15 seconds sometimes. Upstream traces were almost instantaneous. Plus, our customers often converted CAD to GIS and the lines lacked spatial connectivity without a lot of cleanup, but my trace engine could handle disconnected lines and devices that weren’t spatially connected by using attributes.

It was the biggest use of my data structures and algorithms knowledge that I’ve used and it was good enough for a software patent.

It doesn’t even take wind or storms, if they get too big/spread out, they’ll sometimes just spontaneously split down the middle (one in our backyard pulled this trick and one in our front yard, but we were planning on cutting them down anyway - planted by builders and/or previous residents).

I’m not particularly religious and not Catholic, but the Sagrada Familia brought me to tears. The interior is one of the most beautiful man-made spaces I’ve ever seen.

A good example to use for how to read a paper. Make sure you get all the way to the end and see who sponsored the study, then re-read it in a new light. I was reading through the find out what they were eating. Turns out, they were eating Prolon meal packs which you can buy yourself for $175, which gets you five white boxes of snacks. One for each day of your ersatz fast.

It’s very common in the Southeast US. It’s also a term within the science fiction community in the term “con crud” for any sickness acquired at a SF convention.

But if you include TV with film, more and more people are willing to binge what is, essentially, a 10 hour movie. And freed from broadcast schedules, more series are experimenting with different episode lengths. This one needs an extra 20 minutes, whereas another episode is complete after 40 minutes.

Similarly, ebook readers, particularly ones with subscriptions like Kindle Unlimited, are consuming more novellas, which is an awkward length for a full priced, physical book since the (near) death of paper magazines and pulps.

I was playing with the voice interface and pointed out something minor it got wrong (a misunderstood word in my input, not a hallucination/confabulation). The voice response began with, “Oops, my bad”, which made me laugh.

I have ordered dog treats through my Echo. “Alexa, reorder Charlie Bears” but you have to audibly enter a PIN, if I recall correctly. Eh, I might do it again, but it never occurs to me.

But you’re spot on about learning commands instead of it understanding randomly phrased requests.

I’ve got about six Echo devices that I use basically as speakers, timers, grocery lists, weather radios, and some home control (lights and thermostats). I haven’t explored new features or asked it general questions in a while, but what I do use them for, I would miss.

It’s become second nature to say “Alexa, seven minute timer” while I’m cooking. Or “Alexa, add soy sauce to the shopping list” when I open the fridge and pull out an almost empty bottle.

There’s no practical reason to draw, paint, play music, or write as a hobby.

So when can I load these into my TV and turn my 65” UHD TV into a 25” Curtis Mathis console (mini-bar optional) from 1978?

Seriously, my wife is into Mid-Century Modern - a wood console CRT emulator would be awesome. I may need to set up a machine to connect to the TV. But I’d like to watch streamed shows on it.

Not even close. I want a two seats or a bench and a big truck bed. If I can’t haul a piece of plywood and some 2x4’s what’s the use of a truck?

I had a 1998 Toyota Tacoma with a full length truck bed. I swore I’d drive it until the wheels fell off.

Sometime close to 250,000 miles, the u bolts rusted through on the front wheels. One fell off in a drive thru. Got it fixed and the other one checked. They said it was okay, but the other wheel fell off three weeks later. It had a few other problems - AC was leaky, interior plastic was disintegrating, so I sold it for like $1,000 about five years ago and I’ve regretted not just fixing it up and keeping it ever since. I can’t find a similar size/function truck for less than $8-10k. And new “small” trucks aren’t big enough to haul a sheet of plywood. Neither are some big ones.

Are shady fecal transplant clinics a thing yet? Take these antibiotics for a week, then we’ll hose fecal matter from healthy, young, thin people into your intestines like a reverse enema. Move over sperm banks and blood banks, the poop bank is much easier. Only sorta joking.

If I was never exposed to the idea that the brain is where all our thinking occurs and believed instead that the brain was an organ for cooling the blood and the real center of my “soul” was my liver or something: Would I still feel like my “self” is in my head looking out my eyes?