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hapless

4,659 karma · joined August 7, 2008

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hapless··on The Other Epidemic: Trying to get off benzodiazepines
Barbituate withdrawal won’t kill you.

Benzodiazepines, and alcohol, can actually induce death if you withdraw too quickly

hapless··on The Auditor's Opinion
Didn’t Cringely pass away recently?
hapless··on Analyzing Frontier Model Progress with My Favourite Game: Prince of Persia
The XT came out in 1983, it was a real piece of shit by 1989 standards

Not to mention, the PC was a pretty, uh, "challenging" platform for video games. It amazes me someone managed to port something as graphically sophisticated as PoP to an 8088 with CGA.

hapless··on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?
XKL is still in business (https://xkl.com/)

as far as i know the control plane on their equipment is still a pdp-10 compatible

hapless··on Analyzing Frontier Model Progress with My Favourite Game: Prince of Persia
when the author mentioned playing prince of persia on a pc-xt, i assumed this was some kind of ai-generated nonsense

but no

they actually did port the game to the lowest-end hardware available in 1989. you could actually play prince of persia on an 8088 with a cga card!

hapless··on Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free
Specifically, no one will earn a promotion by talking to another team or improving customer service
hapless··on Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal
Anxiety is a common comorbidity in depression patients and buprioprion can dramatically raise anxiety levels

It is a second-line treatment for a reason. Great when it works. Harmful when it does not.

hapless··on The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)
turns out there is more involved in performance than just clock rate

who knew? (everyone)

hapless··on Google limits Meta's use of its Gemini AI models
definitionally that's "for some intents and purposes" my man
hapless··on Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice
clearly german regulators and/or voters disagree, as is their right

nevertheless it is very easy to start a business, and this man is complaining about an entirely separate problem (it is difficult to create and incorporate two shell companies)

hapless··on Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice
It's an important rule if you want the liability protections associated with a limited liability corporation

If you just want to start a business, without any associated shell companies or liability transfers, it costs $0 and requires filing one sheet of paper. It is very easy!

https://www.formulare-bfinv.de/ffw/form/display.do?%24contex...

hapless··on Human Bottlenecks
"Most people are not autodidacts because most people have no material reason to learn a specific topic (i.e. their job does not require it) and the problem with learning for the sake of learning is opportunity cost: there is no a priori reason to learn one thing over another, so better to do nothing and wait for something to appear which actually grabs your interest. Again, this is likely rational! Could you imagine if you found everything interesting? You’d spend years living in a basement curating a wiki of late Soviet military hardware or something."

uhoh

i've been spotted

hapless··on Trade Dollars with other startups. Book it as revenue
SpaceX and Tesla’s not-so-arm’s-length transaction are like, textbook cases for fraud

It amazes me investors or the sec will put up with it

hapless··on 10Gb/s Ethernet: what I did to get it working in my home
10g-base-T is a sick joke

high latency, high error rates, and terrifying heat output from SFPs (which the author noted for himself)

the only cat6 left in my home network is the link to verizon's ont, because in their infinite wisdom the ONLY connectivity offered was 10g-base-t

hapless··on If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
the best/worst part of this is that it is obviously not written by steve blank. it does not look, read, or track like a steve blank blog piece

he obviously generated large parts of this with claude or chatgpt or whatever.

i don't know what that means for the rest of us, but boy it's a big ole spike of signal

hapless··on 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone
Go ahead and require a special gadget to get an "electronically transferrable ticket," no skin off my back. That is a feature I will never use.

Don't bother your season ticket holders about getting their own person admitted! I am standing in front of you, bearing identification, and you are whining about a mobile app?

hapless··on 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone
Forgery is a non-issue -- this guy is a season ticket holder. Literally all they need is his government ID checked against a list.

The "problem" they were trying to "solve" is letting people sell some of their tickets to third parties, but not all of them. That is understandably how they arrived at a mobile application as a solution

But the problem of admitting the original ticket holder is simple as shit. Just .... check his ID?

hapless··on 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone
Forgery isn't relevant.

He's a known individual, a season ticket holder. He's not some random dude showing up with a paper ticket.

hapless··on Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings
After his stunt with the mass firings "because of AI," employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings with Jack Dorsey.

These clowns live in a dreamworld created by their PAs and cronies

hapless··on IronGlass Brings Legendary Soviet Cinema Lenses to Mirrorless Cameras
The Concorde and the Tupolev both relied on afterburners, because they operated under similar design constraints -- the "western" jet engines in the Concorde were not that much better than what Soviet design bureaus could produce.

The Concorde was much smaller, and lacked one of the major innovations of the Tu-144 -- forward flap canards to improve handling on a larger jet.

Probably for the better. The Tupolev killed a lot of its passengers, and it was almost immediately withdrawn from service after the first few incidents. The Concorde, a simpler and smaller design, served for decades.

hapless··on IronGlass Brings Legendary Soviet Cinema Lenses to Mirrorless Cameras
Chaika was not a copy of a Packard. (They certainly admired the Packard bodywork, but Soviet industry was in no way ready to clone a Packard sedan)

Tu-144 was not a copy of the Concorde. (Convergent evolution is not the same as copying a design!)

The Soviets did clone a lot of DEC gear but I don't think SM-1, specifically, was a DEC clone. (In this lastmost case, the Soviets were left cloning computer equipment because it was forbidden to export to COMECON states)

hapless··on Death to Scroll Fade
the reason "reader mode" isn't the default is to discourage website authors from intentionally breaking reader mode

-_-

hapless··on Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line
beyond meat was a super cynical bet that ordinary non-vegetarian consumers would no longer be able to afford meat, so they would turn to meat substitutes even if they were more costly than meat had been in the psat

now they are publicly listed, and their cynical premise has not born fruit

time to pivot!

hapless··on Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat
Clown shit.

Sell your ORCL while you can, folks

hapless··on I ported Linux to the PS5 and turned it into a Steam Machine
You don't have to actually do #3. What most companies do is just get a UL certification (to reassure consumers) and put the label "no user-serviceable parts inside" on the case (to meet UL mandates for safety)

That's more than enough to avoid civil liability for user stupidity

Locking shit down is something you do for other reasons entirely

hapless··on I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
humans without credentials are bad at basic algebra in a word problem, ergo the large language model must be substantially equivalent to a human without a credential

thanks but no thanks

i am often glad my field of endeavour does not require special professional credentials but the advent of "vibe coding" and, just, generally, unethical behavior industry-wide, makes me wonder whether it wouldn't be better to have professional education and licensing

hapless··on DECwindows Motif
spiritual successor? how about "ghoulish horror" ;)

the worst example of "second system effect" i have ever heard of

hapless··on DECwindows Motif
amusingly Motif and CDE were derived from HP attempts to copy Windows 2.x and the betas of Windows 3.0

not windows 3.1 -- windows 3.1 was popular! Windows before 3.1 was distinctly unpopular. It had basically no installed base. The only Windows 2.x applications I know of actually shipped an embedded Windows copy on the floppy disk.

HP was carefully tracking all the much less popular stuff Microsoft was doing in the late 80s because they thought this "WIMP" paradigm had staying powers, even if Microsoft was not exactly selling a lot of units

hapless··on DECwindows Motif
the common element between VMS (the subject of this post) and Windows NT, is Dave cutler.

Cutler lived in an extremely overcomplicated world of VMS kernel primitives, and given the chance to let his freak flag fly, he really overcomplicated his past work for Windows NT

In case you ever wonder why your 1 gb/s ssd has ~100 mb/s throughput on windows. there are often quite literally hundreds of layers of filters on even the simplest i/o

but it is super flexible! just slower than iced treacle. aren't you glad you had an object oriented I/O subsystem supporting microkernel services and aspect-oriented programming? i bet you use those features way more often than you read or write files from disk

hapless··on DECwindows Motif
motif had the opposite of versionitis

from 1989 to 2005 everyone used more or less the same version (from 1989) because vendors and standards are painful

it wasn't like, meaningfully standardized. just no one ever updated anything. or set a meaningful version string. you just guessed which bugs were un-fixed based on `uname`

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