patwolf

15 ms·

151.
by patwolf 4y ago
It's not just phones. Yesterday I tried to dust off a MacBook Air from 2012 so that the kids could play some games. It was used regularly up until 3 years ago, but now pretty much all software is broken, and it won't let me upgrad
152.
by patwolf 4y ago
I have this problem a lot when searching for TypeScript. Most of the results end up being plain javascript with absolutely no mention of TypeScript. Now I use ChatGPT for almost all my programming questions. Good riddance Google.
153.
by patwolf 4y ago
I was at IBM around the time of the SCO lawsuit and had to help out with blue washing a few projects. It was also around that time that there had been some high-profile cases of GPL code getting shipped accidentally. We had a tool that basi
154.
by patwolf 4y ago
> The first time he had to copy something in the office didn’t exactly go well. “It kept coming out as a blank page, and took me a couple times to realize that I had to place the paper upside-down in the machine for it to work.” I had ne
155.
by patwolf 4y ago
I can understand the need, especially with kids books, to update them to keep parents willing to buy them. I own some of the original Hardy Boys books, and I won't be reading them to my kids. On the other hand, the Little House on the
156.
by patwolf 4y ago
Scott Alexander has written several pieces mentioning Von Neumann. This is one of them: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid... From what I recall, there was a singular time and place
157.
by patwolf 4y ago
I too am skeptical that piracy was their biggest problem. I was a Sega fan, but I had no interest in the Dreamcast because I had been burned by the Saturn. When they did eventually decide to discontinue the Dreamcast, they had a fire sale t
158.
by patwolf 4y ago
I read an article, probably a decade or more ago, about how bad it would be for NYC cab companies that Ford was discontinuing the Crown Vic. The reasoning was that repair costs would increase because it was the last vehicle where individual
159.
by patwolf 4y ago
I used QGIS to help me import some terrain into Minecraft. I found a lidar elevation map, used QGIS to visualize it in 3d and tweak some things, and then I was able to use another tool to do the conversion into Minecraft. Definitely an impr
160.
by patwolf 4y ago
Anyone remember GOOG-411? During the days before smart phones, you'd call a phone number and do a Google search via voice. My favorite part was that the sound it made while waiting for the results was a human making robotic beep-boop s
161.
by patwolf 4y ago
I now reflexively start typing smile.amazon.com instead of amazon.com into the url bar. Hopefully the smile url will continue to work because it's going to take me a while to unlearn.
162.
by patwolf 4y ago
I live in a newer house which is air sealed to improve energy efficiency. With all the talk of indoor pollutants like CO2 and NOx, I often wonder if the air quality is worse than it would be in an older, drafty house. When I research it, mo
163.
by patwolf 4y ago
> A short while later, Mary was brought into the parlor, a meek and timid looking young woman with a pockmarked face and downcast eyes. I could see at once that she was terrified, and it was clear to me that she was not the culprit. Havi
164.
by patwolf 4y ago
I would rather assume that this technology exists unfettered by any regulation and instead figure out how to deal with the ramifications. Guns are regulated, but we still have metal detectors.
165.
by patwolf 4y ago
I dug out my old Nintendo DSs and gave them to the kids. The fact that the chat/drawing app could automatically link the DSs and they could just start chatting blew me away. The kids actually preferred using the DS over the switch. Thi
166.
by patwolf 4y ago
That original $39,974 price point was always BS and probably just easy marketing to get "Electric truck for under 40k" in the headlines. They announced it over a year in advance during a time of high inflation when you couldn&#x27
167.
by patwolf 4y ago
> IBM sent people around to talk to us, and they were simply the wrong people. Initially they sent marketing big shots, who didn't understand anything technical at all. ... They sent technical people, who just had the attitude, &quo
168.
by patwolf 4y ago
The nice thing about humans (at least some of them) is that you can ultimately explain to them why they're wrong and they'll understand. When ChatGPT gives you wrong or contradictory information, there's no recourse.
169.
by patwolf 4y ago
I never knew about this tool, but it looks quite useful--much better than just using df. The only thing I wish it had was a squarified treemap view of disk space. There was an old graphical tool for Windows called SequoiaView that I used to
170.
by patwolf 4y ago
I would be interested in a good open-source software workflow for enhancing digitized film. Things like removing dust and scratches, correcting contrast, frame interpolation, and upscaling. Several years ago I researched this I ended up hav
171.
by patwolf 4y ago
I asked it a question about how to do something with dates in the .NET Entity Framework, and it give me a long explanation with code of how rowversion is used for optimistic concurrency control. Completely unrelated to what I was asking. I
172.
by patwolf 4y ago
Matt Levine wrote about Zillow's failed flipping business in his newsletter last year. The way he described it seemed less evil than I imagined. I had imagined corporations trying to corner a market so that they could sell at inflated
173.
by patwolf 4y ago
I had an older XPS 13 developer edition. My main complaint was that it used a thin barrel-tip charger. After relegating it to the kid's Minecraft machine, the plug would get jostled around and short out the charger. After several charg
174.
by patwolf 4y ago
If it makes you feel any better, I read a clickbait article this week on why young people shouldn't save for their retirement. The gist is that they can easily make up the difference in their high-earning older years, so it's not
175.
by patwolf 4y ago
The author mentioned that UML peaked in 2000. I started a job in the IBM software group three years later, just a couple of months after IBM acquired Rational. I don't recall anyone using UML during my time at IBM, even though we had f
176.
by patwolf 4y ago
I've been a defender of GCP in the past, and I've been quick to point out that while Google has a reputation for killing products, GCP has been fairly stable. This, however, changes my opinion. I've been successfully using Cl
177.
by patwolf 4y ago
I'd be curious what your wind setup looks like. I have some land off grid which gets good wind, and I'm trying to decide whether that could be a reasonable alternative to solar. I don't see nearly as much information about re
178.
by patwolf 4y ago
I've always wondered how iRobot hasn't been more successful. They have a cool name, brand recognition, first-mover advantage. It's been nearly 20 years since their IPO. I would have expected by now that robots would have take
179.
by patwolf 4y ago
I'm interested in trying ReviewMeta. In the past I used Fakespot quite a bit, but I started seeing cases where it wouldn't flag products with obviously fake reviews, and it would flag perfectly good products. For example, try it w
180.
by patwolf 4y ago
In high school before I had even heard the song on the radio, we went on a field trip to local pharmaceutical lab. One of the chemists there had printed out copies of the lyrics for us from an email that had it mislabeled as being from Kurt

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