Thwompthwomp

The Dash Berlin ASOT 600 set (specifically Sofia) got me through my dissertation writing. Even now, if I sit down with a coffee and turn on the set, within the couple minutes I am completely in the zone for working. It’s like a brain hack for me.

I also like the Music for programming site (specifically RITES) which is also good for some focus music.

I’ve tried to get some folks to post their dissertation writing music and form a massive playlist, as it seems really common to have some certain song or album. I’m sure it’s similar for other intense work flows too.

He does get a bit ranty. I still appreciate his take though. Some of the LLMs are super helpful for me for some tasks, but the hype cycle for AI is really a lot to take and it does warrant some actual pushback against it. I can tell I’m becoming more of an old man, but it’s nice to have someone else confirm how bad the Internet is becoming. It’s almost like a hazy dream for me of back in the early days when it was just people sharing weird stuff with each other and not the active battle to fend off ads and scummy sites to find things.

That’s almost the exact opposite experience for me. Maybe there’s been a more recent update, but I remember searching for specific phrases in decade old messages and the gmail (web site) search would just flat out refuse to show things but I could find them from my phone. I’ll try again, but to be honest, I’ve somewhat given up on google search in general for results that aren’t recent.

The search has been broken for me for a while. I get better results in the iOS mail app. Searching from within gmail will just flat out not show old results.

Similarly, in the midst of historic layoffs in the tech industry, no one blames the CEO for horrible management leading to the over hiring or bad management that led to this. O one blames Zuckerberg for renaming his company and betting an an absurdity that is already being scraped off of PR releases. All because some growth number goes up. It’s insanity.

I have an lg tv that I route through a pihole that blocks most stuff. I wasn’t going to connect it to the internet, but it had airplay support. I think I’m using this list: https://github.com/TheShawnMiranda/LG-TV-Ad-Block

Snaps just act strange. They update in weird ways, it’s always automatic and it’s confusing how to keep something in a version that won’t auto update. It’s been a bad experience for me.

I think this is a good point. Lemmy pre protest sucked. There was just no content or activity. Post protest, it’s not too bad here. It’s viable. Slowly, hopefully more people end up here over the years. I still browse Reddit (not logged in, my account is kaput) and it seems the same as it was before though. However, digg too died, so there is hope yet.

Kubuntu 22.04 LTS. 2-in-1 from dell.

Touch mostly worked fine. Xournalpp detected pen fine too. When I flipped the screen all the way back, things get wonky though and I have to reset the Wacom drivers. Sometimes it’s fine. I also had to write a xrandr script to rotate the screen to portrait.

In general, it’s mostly alright. I hear that Wayland is much better but I haven’t tried it yet. I do use the stylus quite often for marking up PDFs though and it works well.

It’s been getting absolutely worse and worse with hardware as they shovel crap at you and then also expect you to buy subscriptions to make it usable. Keysight/agilent/ whoever they are had been really annoying about this.

We have a piece of test equipment that runs windows 2000. It has to be quarantined on its own subnet isolated from the rest of the network.

I think you have some good points, but I’m not 100% sure I agree though. Modern computers are much more complex than earlier ones if the 80s and 90s. (I guess I’m ignoring the earlier VAXs and stuff and thinking more of personal computers.) I saw a keynote from an OS conference which was pointing out that there are very few actual os papers, as the hardware is so much more complex and actually multiple smaller os’s managing the various system on chip components.

Also, Mac has over the years gone to great lengths to hide how things actually work. Like 5 years ago I remember getting really confused just attaching a debugger to a c simple C program I was toying with.

At the end you say that OSs are so easy monkeys could use them, and I think that’s my point too. They intentionally get easier to use and fade into the background and don’t really encourage tinkering with the lower level stuff.

You are correct that the basics of computers are similar and that’s why arduino and other microcontrollers are still basically the same as they were years ago, just the main difference I’ve seen is moving to more and more RTOS and trading off a bit of speed and memory, whereas a decade ago it was a lot more low level assembly optimization.

Good points though! I appreciate them. I teach some computer engineering stuff and I think about a lot of this and how best to talk about some of the lower level stuff.