HackerTrans
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

RichardCA

no profile record

comments

RichardCA
·il y a 26 jours·discuss
I'll just add...

Being able to eat pork without cooking it to death for fear of trichinosis is a recent development.

Also, the old movies where someone tries to commit suicide by sticking their head in an oven. That was coal gas and we don't heat homes with it anymore.
RichardCA
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
Here's a fun one, Benson and Hedges commissioned some classic 80's CGI, it got played at one of the art-house animation festivals that was a thing for nerds to do in the 80's. Looks like it was Robert Abel who did it.

But what was the point? It seemed like they were trying to sell gold collectibles to rich people in Malaysia.

https://youtu.be/fdBoKOpctp4
RichardCA
·il y a 5 mois·discuss
A lot to unpack here. He espoused a worldview where human beings are "star stuff", a way for the Universe to be self-aware.

And this worldview does not exclude spiritual thinking, it just channels it in a specific direction.

Yes, he said our brains are made from the same matter as everything else, but it does not follow that he espoused any sort of strict materialism.

The truth is more subtle and nuanced than that.

If you are interested in getting inside his head, I recommend reading the Mr. X article.

https://marijuana-uses.com/mr-x/
RichardCA
·il y a 5 mois·discuss
Sagan made solid contributions to Planetary Science in the 60's and 70's.

His role as PBS educator, SF author, etc. needs to be considered as a separate thing.

I also loved James Burke and his Connections series, but as it got into the later seasons the so-called "connections" got tenuous and sometimes quite strained.

You can go through all the classic PBS science shows and find problems, Stephen Hawking's Universe was basically unwatchable because they refused to engage with the math.
RichardCA
·il y a 6 mois·discuss
> Sorry pal, you're alone on that hill.

No, he's absolutely not.
RichardCA
·il y a 6 mois·discuss
It's done that way because of pre-visualization or Previs, which has been the norm for over a decade now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxTNhNe6Fbc
RichardCA
·il y a 6 mois·discuss
I used to work in my mom and dad's print shop when I was a kid. 6 picas in an inch, 12 points in a pica, and by the time you go home your hands smell like hypo. That should give you an idea of how old I am.

For a kid I was passably good at setting up headlines for paste-up, but I never had to be the one who used an X-Acto Knife.

I'll die on the hill where 2K is better than 4K if your livelihood depends on having to stare at a screen at a distance of 60cm for upwards of 10 hours a day, longer sometimes.

I also think you missed my point about about the anti-aliasing. For various reasons I still use Windows and some of my favorite monospace fonts only exist in the the .FON format. I can emulate the X-Windows experience of using the misc-fixed-medium family and it works just fine for my needs.

I've tried most of the fonts here, but none of them really do it for me: https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads

But if you want to keep going on with the pedantry, have at it. Were you around in the Usenet days?
RichardCA
·il y a 6 mois·discuss
Emacs user. And the fonts I use have to work with anti-aliasing turned off.

Right now I'm using a Dell/Alienware AW3225DM and it's perfect for my needs (work + occasional gaming, and most of my gaming is retro). Best Buy was discounting these during the Xmas season.

I do not want anything higher than 2560x1440 because it makes my fonts look tiny, or I have to turn anti-aliasing on. Neither option is OK with me.
RichardCA
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
It's debatable whether it was first recorded in '63 or '64.

The genesis of Guaraldi's involvement was a 1963 documentary "A Boy Named Charlie Brown" which has nothing to do with the 1969 animated feature.

This was produced for TV but never aired, and recently surfaced on Youtube: https://youtu.be/UGAs5fZUvBM&t=425s

To complicate things further, Guaraldi released "Jazz Impressions of A Boy Named Charlie Brown" (once again, based on the 1963 documentary) but these recordings are not the same as the cues used in the documentary.
RichardCA
·il y a 8 mois·discuss
https://youtu.be/fs9Wyuub3jY

Once you develop an awareness of how SF screenplay writers do this, you can't unsee it.

Babylon 5 was particularly egregious, I was never a fan but I was puzzled that JMS had to do rely on it so heavily. It was like he created the character of Delenn just to be an exposition dumper and Mira Furlan faithfully did what was asked of her. Screenwriters also call this diegesis if the writer goes all the way and uses dialog to explicitly feed the narrative to the audience.

https://youtu.be/VhD0hbGEDSU
RichardCA
·il y a 8 mois·discuss
If you go back and watch the first two seasons of HBO's Westworld, you will see Anthony Hopkins' character repeatedly doing exposition dumps out of his mouth. The difference is in how he does it, that he is in such complete command of his craft that he can work out exactly what the screenwriters intended without drawing any attention to it.

And Trekkies will remember the time Larry Niven wrote a screenplay for TAS and gave all the exposition dumps to Leonard Nimoy. See how nicely he handles it?

https://youtu.be/B65HEhBR-1s
RichardCA
·il y a 9 mois·discuss
More likely to get hit with a Zero Tolerance punishment for a single isolated incident, which derails your entire trajectory through the school system.

https://www.reddit.com/r/lansing/comments/1no5rtl/lansing_pa...
RichardCA
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
If you don't like the word Genocide you can call it Demographic Engineering, but the fact that it is happening is beyond debate.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15npnzpd08o
RichardCA
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
I've always felt like tech workers view themselves as a modern-day petite-bourgeoisie, and this is why the industry has been so successful at keeping out the unions.

As an aside, I had friends who had to declare bankruptcy during DotCom 1.0 because of stock options and the Alternative Minimum Tax. This could have been fixed with legislation but it always seemed like the DC inside-the-beltway crowd saw the whole thing as class treachery and refused to intervene.
RichardCA
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
If you're talking about the ones who drove supply trucks during the war years, the hardest working men were women.

https://vietnamnews.vn/sunday/features/947180/female-drivers...
RichardCA
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
Ironically, I would far prefer the Douglas Adams idea of "Genuine People Personalities" over the current status quo.

If the self checkout scanner at the supermarket started bickering with me for entering the wrong produce code, that would wrap up the whole Turing Test thing for me.
RichardCA
·il y a 2 ans·discuss
It's reasonable to assume that he knew the Monty Python reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLlv_aZjHXc&t=70s
RichardCA
·il y a 3 ans·discuss
Yeah I agree. I actually had the same thought as the author, use the example of wave/particle duality in Physics. The problem is most people don't understand that (how to grasp the paradox and have the right intuition about it) and you will just come across as a pedantic smartass. The ones who do know some advanced Physics will see you as a dilettante. Teaching Physics with correct pedagogy is hard. Even harder than Git.
RichardCA
·il y a 3 ans·discuss
I am in no way a front-end person, but my understanding is that it has to do with React and the way it maintains a virtual copy of the DOM.

Having Ctrl-F not work correctly is maddening and I hate it.
RichardCA
·il y a 4 ans·discuss
From a Devops perspective, I think people are accustomed to staring at a screenful of yaml or json output when something goes wrong, but not a screenful of XML. But at the sams time, a lot of places still use Jenkins, which is now the mature, legacy product. If you've been in the industry for more than a decade, this comes across as ironic, but no one knows what the next thing will be, that will finally put yaml in the rear-view mirror where it belongs.