Month: January 2019

Textual

Chill Uncategorized

1979-1981: Edit-80 for TRS-80

1981(?)-1984(?): Another Text Editor by Robert Labenski for DOS

1985-1991(?): EditV for DOS.

1992-1995: EZEdit(?) for DOS

1995-1998: SuperPad for Windows95/98

1999-2009: Gedit, Kate or Pe (ending ca. 2002) for BeOS with some Programmer’s Notepad for Windows thrown in

2009-2014: Notepad++, Sublime Text or Gedit

2014-2019: Sublime Text or TextEdit for MacOS

Holy hell, I’ve been doing this computer stuff for a long time. The dates or editors I’m not at all sure about I put a question mark beside.

Insectionality

Chill Regular-ass Post

People just don’t understand how strongly linked to and dependent we are on the biosphere. Most have no idea.

If terrestrial insects are dying out — and all signs point to that being the case — then we’ll soon follow. That’s not apocalypticism or alarmism. That’s just the fact of the matter.

Precarious

Chill Uncategorized

Why do older people like Kevin Drum have such trouble understanding that people 35ish and younger lead much more precarious lives than the Boomer set ever experienced? I guess it’s because if they do understand this then they might have to do something about it. Despite all the data, the stories, the obviousness of it, the Drum cohort just doesn’t get it.

I’m not a Millennial and my life has never been particularly precarious in adulthood (childhood is a different story), but I remember when getting a job was much easier, health care was much, much less expensive, college was far cheaper, and housing was also vastly cheaper — yes, inflation-adjusted. Literally all the essentials of life have gotten far more expensive relative to wages while TVs and electronics have gotten less costly (thus skewing inflation numbers enormously).

When I first got out of the Army in 1999, one could find an apartment in many large cities for $350 a month ($530 in today’s dollars). That is not possible anywhere now, large city or not. College was half the price. Health care was half the price or less. In addition, there were fewer outright scams and “experts” stealing from your wallet.

No, the world has not gotten roundly gotten worse. But if you’re a young person today, your life is far more uncertain and provisional than the prior few generations experienced. Which would be a lot easier to take I think if they weren’t so utterly committed to gaslighting everyone about it.

Failing

Chill Regular-ass Post

One of the reasons I like weightlifting is that it’s one of the few areas of life where you are supposed to fail. That’s the whole point of it; if you don’t lift until you fail, you aren’t doing any good.

It’s a completely different approach than most of what we do, where we must meet some goal, leap some hurdle. Obviously, lifting competitions are an exception, but 99% of lifters never compete — for most, as it is for me, the idea is to lift as much as you can until you fail since that’s how you get stronger.

I like a sport where failure is the explicit goal.

Ice Ice Crazy

Chill Regular-ass Post

Watching this video of terrible drivers driving terribly, what struck me is how many of those slides were easily recoverable.

It really shows that most people aren’t really good drivers at all. I’m not a great driver or anything, but I can recover from a slide. That’s very easy for me.

What is with all the people slamming on the brakes in ice? That’s like the first thing you don’t do.

Emma 2

Chill Uncategorized

I wish the show The Gifted were better, because it’s so mediocre that even Emma Dumont, as excellent as she is, cannot save it.

I hope she is in a lot more. Her IMDB page says she’ll be in a movie in 2019, so let’s hope it’s worth a watch. I mean, I will watch it just because she’s in it but if it’s good, too, all the better.

Now I need to go back to watch everything she’s ever been in. Talent like hers is rare so it’s worth it. And it has nothing to do with her acting skill, but because it’s cute, here’s a video of Emma D. playing the autoharp and singing. Alas, talent is not evenly distributed.

And here’s a scene of her being very different.

The ending is particularly good. And that’s some good stuntwork, too, by whoever did that. Looks completely real both on Dumont’s part and the actor/stuntperson taking the fall.

Dejection

Chill Uncategorized

The hesitation is because decent men are scared of being labelled a harasser, worried that they’ll get the “I have a boyfriend” line when they’re just trying to do something nice, or otherwise be rejected/cold shouldered in some bizarre way. Just as women are harassed constantly, this sort of thing happens to men constantly.

If a woman speaks to me in public is about the only time I will engage with a woman I don’t know, and even then I keep it as cursory, neutral, and clipped as possible no matter what she says/does. Most men who aren’t bastards will be doing the same these days.

Yes, it’s a bad equilibrium for everyone, but what’s the alternative?

Mation

Chill Regular-ass Post

So You Automated Your Coworkers Out of a Job.

I have done this. It sucks but is also not really capable of being stopped. Sometimes, people have been doing tasks for 20+ years that really can be done by a small shell script these days. One place that a company worked for took over, we easily got rid of six IT staff (including an Oracle DBA who made well over 250K a year) by automating backups and other tasks, converting to MS SQL, removing some ancient Citrix environments, reducing support for old platforms, improving VPN, and putting in self-service password resets and a real ticketing system. It’s not that these six people were doing nothing, but what they were doing was a complete waste of time in several different ways that actually hurt the company more than it helped.

This churn would not be a bad thing if we had a real safety net in this country. It helps no one to have people scurrying around doing useless tasks that a machine can do in 0.001 seconds. And frankly, if you are doing these sort of tasks, sooner or later (probably sooner) someone is going to notice, and then say, “This girl/guy appears to be here to hit a button every 10 minutes. They’ve been doing it for the past 20 years.”

Boss: “Well, can you automate it?”

Me: “Yes, I automated it already. Here’s the two-line script that I just wrote while I was talking to you.”

If you have that kind of job, well, you probably won’t for much longer given the way things are moving.

Wall Wall Wall, What Have We Here

Chill Uncategorized

I don’t give a crap, really, about Trump’s wall either way. It’s stupid, but it’s minor stupid. It won’t help much, won’t hurt much, and the main negative impact will be ecological.

For the left and so-called liberals, I think their de facto open borders stance is a huge loser and a bad idea generally. I suspect that if they mostly backed away from open borders fetishism and virtue signaling, they could probably pick up another 5ish percent of Republican-leaning voters and win far more elections.

I will never understand how it can be that many leftists and progressives tend to value people who aren’t citizens and don’t live here over legal residents and American citizens, but they truly do and it’s pretty disgusting.