a4isms

15 ms·

181.
by a4isms 4y ago
He said himself “Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach.” Which is exactly the basis of the so-called “cancel culture:” You can say anything you want on a web site you own, but you don’t have the right to say anything you want on a priva
182.
by a4isms 4y ago
Yes, just as every fashion company makes its money from people who think they would be really, really, really ridiculously good-looking if they wear these specific clothes. Selling aspirations is a pretty good business model.
183.
by a4isms 4y ago
Let's just say that while my library of best practices has grown over the ensuing decades, my collection of anecdotes about worst practices has grown even faster :-D
184.
by a4isms 4y ago
Not that it matters greatly, but FYI this app ran on a product called 4th Dimension, a 4GL app-building environment running a proprietary database on Macintosh desktop systems. They also had a client-server version that ran on local network
185.
by a4isms 4y ago
Personal ads in those days did not usually have real names or addresses in them, regardless of sexual orientation. Some had personal phone numbers, but in those days you could also pay a few bucks more and rent a voicemail number just to pu
186.
by a4isms 4y ago
If you want to point out that I could have been even smarter thirty-plus years ago, the line forms to the left... Stretches down the block... Goes around the corner... &c. But while my memory is imperfect, I believe that I hardcoded t
187.
by a4isms 4y ago
These were the days before you could just ssh and/or vpn into a client's production system, so I would copy their db onto my Mac, run the mongler on it, and then I would take the database home with me, without worrying whether the
188.
by a4isms 4y ago
Most interesting, I do believe you're right!
189.
by a4isms 4y ago
I once had a classified ad software hustle, and I needed customer data to debug things. But one of my customers was Canada's largest gay newspaper, and ts classifieds were highly sensitive. So I wrote a routine that obfuscated the data
190.
by a4isms 4y ago
FYI, it's "toeing" the line. It's an expression from track and field, where at the start of each race the competitors place the tip ("toe") of their foot on the start line when they're ready to run. Simila
191.
by a4isms 4y ago
"Computers will not steal your job. People leveraging computers will steal your job." —1963, 1973, 1983, 1993...2023
192.
by a4isms 4y ago
I’m not as funny as I think I am: The GP misspelt “bought” as “bough.” I thought a pun would be a fun way to point that out. I was wrong.
193.
by a4isms 4y ago
Is there really a dichotomy between 1. Someone providing "proof" that you will accept, and 2. This being what you claim without evidence or justification is the "usual" smearing?
194.
by a4isms 4y ago
Elon bough it because he wanted to branch out.
195.
by a4isms 4y ago
n.b. They flaunted the fact that they could get away with flouting regulations.
196.
by a4isms 4y ago
“ Any sufficiently complicated model class contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a state machine. ” –a former colleague
197.
by a4isms 4y ago
Cheating, unsportsmanlike... The world is full of things that are legal but considered odious. Ultimately, if a sport becomes dominated by winning-at-the-expense-of-fan-enjoyment, it gets into trouble, so either the rules need another bug f
198.
by a4isms 4y ago
This is hardly the first such weird outcome for a match that reflects a larger strategy of advancing in a tournament rather than simply attempting to win the match. It has been an ongoing scandal that teams collude to fix world cup matches
199.
by a4isms 4y ago
Keep up, What we actually do when travelling is use a Tornado Mixer. We slice ourselves into thousands of pieces and those pieces are semi-randomly mixed with the pieces of other crypto heroes, who travel by different routes. Only after rea
200.
by a4isms 4y ago
Trivia: The title of the movie “Swordfish” is named after an old Marx Brothers routine from the movie “Horse Feathers, “ which revolves around an illegal speakeasy’s password to get in. Which is, of course, “swordfish.” https://w
201.
by a4isms 4y ago
Sorry, are we talking about videogaming? Or a career as a programmer?
202.
by a4isms 4y ago
People act like books are just words to read, but the fact is that handling a well-made artefact of any kind stimulates different neural pathways into your brain than just looking at it. Books can have heft. They can be pleasing to touch. T
203.
by a4isms 4y ago
You can buy a print of a single image from Susan Kare's original Macintosh iconography for USD 160, and it doesn't come with any words! This edition gives you five more prints and a whole book. I think it really is a matter of thi
204.
by a4isms 4y ago
Way back when Joel Spolsky was a high-profile blogger in the "starting your own software business" genre, I asked him for advice about my blogging, and he replied "Stop what you're doing and get your blog onto your own d
205.
by a4isms 4y ago
Fred Hampton may have opinions about how different things are… Or aren’t. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
206.
by a4isms 4y ago
An ad hominem appeal to propriety: "The moment I heard my opponent in the debate speaking in the vulgar dialect, I knew at once I could dismiss their arguments as those made by The Wrong Sort Of People. If they were serious about polit
207.
by a4isms 4y ago
Be careful. If your freezer is really cold, you can turn your CDs into superconductors, which may not lose bits, but they do introduce quantum shuffling of bits, where the same bits physically exchange position with other bits.
208.
by a4isms 4y ago
Forgive me for repeating an old joke, but it does say so much about audiophile culture: Q: What's the difference between an audiophile and a musicologist? A: A musicologist uses a stereo to listen to music, but an audiophile uses mu
209.
by a4isms 4y ago
Christoper Robin Milne is a famous example of having one's childhood turned into content, although obviously nothing anywhere near as pervasively as happens with attention-starved "influencers" leveraging their children for a
210.
by a4isms 4y ago
> we also do poorly at guessing the direction or shape of progress I think this is especially true over longer time frames, because in our hubris, we extrapolate from what we know today, and cannot (by definition) extrapolate from things

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