jhbadger

5 ms·

61.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
When people write things like this I wonder if they just haven't used AI coding agents. You don't simply write a prompt and walk away and have a complete program written when you get back. You still have to put a fair amount of ef
62.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
In the US because of the merger of the AFL and CIO into the current AFL-CIO, "unions" in the US mean both the industrial "worker's rights" style unions like the CIO had, as well as the "guild" style unions
63.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
And even if you "had AC" it typically wasn't central AC. Even when I was growing up in the 1970s our only AC was a window unit in my parents' bedroom. On hot summer nights we would go and sleep on their floor.
64.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Levittown-style homes for returning WWII veterans were poor quality -- "little boxes all made of ticky-tack" as the song goes, but even high quality homes of the midcentury were still tiny -- the average size of a US house in 19
65.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
They should have some rivers in Montana -- probably most people's primary association of fly fishing is with Norman Maclean's autobiographical novella "A River Runs Through It" and Robert Redford's 1992 film of it.
66.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Even if something is relative, you can compare it to what other people believe. If most people who know person X think X has "good taste" (that is, that their tastes more or less agree, or at least that they aspire to having simi
67.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Even speakers of more common languages like English used Latin for science. Newton wrote the Principia in Latin and William Harvey wrote De Motu Cordis (the book that showed that the heart was a pump that circulated blood) in Latin, for exa
68.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
That's what people say - that they can tell if something has been 'shopped. And maybe they can with particularly clumsy manipulation. But the fact is just with as with people claiming something is AI, they often claim that somet
69.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
One thing that people might not realize is that the waffle design is meant to remind you of the waffle design of Union Station's ceiling (which in turn was inspired by waffle ceilings in Roman architecture like in the Pantheon) - so it
70.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
This sort of thing is older than generative AI. For the last couple of decades it has been impossible to share an interesting photograph without someone claiming that it was Photoshopped.
71.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Not Chicago, but I always liked listening to Feynman lecture in his working-class NYC accent.
72.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
I don't know. I think some "wonders" like the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls are more impressive in aerial videos and are kind of a let down in person -- you can't really see the whole thing when you are next to it.
73.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Anyone who wants it can have Termux which gives you a full Linux experience under Android with GNU tools if you want it, though.
74.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
True, but in the Neuromancer universe they still have public pay phones and at one point the main AI keeps ringing the phones to get the main character to answer as there doesn't seem to be any other way for it to contact someone when
75.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
It reminds me how at work we had to take a course hosted on our domain about how to recognize phishing and a few days later we got an e-mail from outside our domain saying we had to take a course about a different subject on their domain. W
76.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
They don't even predict all the technological changes. I love how in William Gibson's Neuromancer they have VR, true AI, and even fancy orbital resorts, but not mobile phones!
77.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
I'm sure that's why mall owners like it but Bradbury was advocating it from the angle of discovering cool alleys with little shops and restaurants like you can in an old chaotic city like Rome.
78.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
He also had interesting ideas on shopping malls of all things, hoping that they could turn into places where people would socialize besides shopping and that they should have a maze-like layout so that people could get what he called "
79.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
I think the idea is that the house had large amounts of storage and freezers that it could use to get ingredients for meals which it then cooked.
80.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Wisconsin ("America's dairyland" according to the motto, although other states produce more these days) tries occasionally to introduce bills to prevent non-dairy beverages labeling themselves "milk" in the state on
81.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Google's Go has made finding info on the ancient Chinese board game generally referred to in English by its Japanese name Go difficult. This has has interestingly lead to increased use of its original name Weiqi or its Korean name Badu
82.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
"Alien philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not aliens" Plenty of non-Chinese people study Chinese philosophy. It isn't at all irrelevant if the goal is to understand the Chinese (not to mention that some of thei
83.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
Don Lancaster did. He used to write programs in Postscript to make figures - he preferred that to using drawing programs.
84.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
While there are things like heart rate monitors that can't be replicated on a phone, I've never understood why people bring up step tracking or timers as traits of a smartwatch. My phone tracks my steps and can be used to set a ti
85.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
>While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks. In the US. While disk drives were essential there, in Europe tape was standard in the 8-bit era and even most commercial software was sold on
86.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
8-bit computers had no real "OS" (well, maybe CP/M on the Z80 machines counted). That made programming very different from programming on something like Windows, which involved using APIs. When you programmed on a 8-bit machi
87.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
It wasn't only on the C64, although probably was most successful there. Adding structured programming to a BASIC-like language was a good idea -- so much so that most BASIC dialects in the 1990s adopted it, dooming COMAL.
88.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
If only the C64's floppy drives weren't so unbearably slow! And they even had their own CPUs -- the Apple II may have had worse graphics and sound (to be fair it was designed five years before the C64), but its floppy drives were
89.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
I think there needs actual statistical evidence (rather than sensationalist hysteria) that very many people think their chatbot lover is real. Before chatbots, there were (and still are as far as I know) phone sex lines where people paid to
90.
by jhbadger 3mo ago
The plural of anecdote is not data - and it was exactly these sort of anecdotes that led to the anti-D&D hysteria as well. Often something else was going on - for instance "Mazes & Monsters itself was very loosely based on an i

More ›