OldCoder

@cmccullough @mayintoronto Over the years, a number of people from IRC visited me IRL. I actually lived for a while with somebody from a game world. We had a kick-ass Christmas that year, 2020, that won't be equaled in my lifetime. It's not something to be rushed. However, if an online association has evolved to the point of trust, which is of course an important issue, online and IRL can become one and the same. During the IRC era, I used to refer to this as IRCL or IRLC. 😀

@MissConstrue @lxskllr You called? This is Bob speaking. We're only here and not still on the Savannah due to Everett Wheeler. There was no old man with a beard. There were simply a lot of dice, so many that we came up on one of the throws. Still, we could have done better.

unless they need a CPAP to sleep; in which case, it's the mediverse

DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA Source: A foolish Old Coder and not LLM Illustration: GenAI of Elon in the Sky AI is Satan So, Fedi AI is hatin' To most, that seems fine Few that are sane for AI pine Flames the Old Coder doesn't seek This rhyme is tongue in cheek He sees AI both sides Does not totally derides But the AI of right now Is a world-eating monster cow Cthulhu, give up your seat The cow is the monster to beat AI the economy will smash After the crash Billionaires at the bottom of the sea The place where they need to be Mad Max 2 world with burning tires Every institution set to expires Crushed by AI and the orange toad It's a colorful story and frightening load The world's great age begins anew The golden years return Yeah, right, that's not going to ensue It's all going to burn Meet me on the other side We'll be in rags, but we'll find our stride Let's collect the pieces Hand them to our nephews and nieces There will be a bit of this and that AI will be there but with a small hat Not much gas, but hopefully the Net I'd rather have the Net, you bet Little will have been learned A few more years may have been earned Then the rest of the bill will come due It's going to be warm, you know this is true After that, it'll be down to the sunless sea We won't be there, not you or me Twice five miles of infertile ground No bird will sing, there won't be a sound #AI #climatechange #CoderSongs #rhyme #Trump

My most recent employment was for a large firm. It was one of the majors in the oil and gas industry. The company was of course, a Windows house. I did most of my work in the Windows WSL [aka Ubuntu] subsystem. This allowed me to use my usual Linux scripts and tricks. So, I only needed to pick up some of the Windows software and workflows that the company used. For example, instead of learning Visio and doing laborious point and click procedures to draw architecture diagrams, I whipped up a Python diagram script framework and used that. You mentioned Support. Support per se for essentially anything was largely non-existent. One would open a ticket with an overseas call center. A few months later, one would check and the ticket would still be there. You could open another ticket to request an escalation. That ticket would still be there months later as well. If you ask, how did things get done, the answer is that it was largely about tribal knowledge. My favorite story from that company is that I wrote a CLI script for a manager to enable her to do something. The script needed to be stored somewhere formally. Management convened a team of about a dozen senior people to review the matter. I had to explain what CLI was. What a script was as well and the concept of storing a file. There was a lot of pushback about, couldn't the company simply use some sort of outside SaaS tool that it could rent from its usual vendors? The discussion took about two weeks. In the end, a subcommittee was designated to manage the storage of a single file and to keep an eye on it so that it couldn't go rogue. Everybody seemed proud to have worked this out. It isn't solely about Windows. Note that #Windows supports its own scripts. PowerShell, not just Linux type. But the culture in some firms has shifted entirely to online #SaaS. Even long-term developers, in some cases, don't know that #CLI even exists. They do things by click, move mouse, click, move mouse. It's incredibly slow.

DJT doesn't intend to allow that to happen. See: SAVE Act. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/save-act-and-election-power-grab

Work. Some businesses are Windows houses. However, remember, Windows comes with Ubuntu now: https://linuxvox.com/blog/how-to-enable-wsl-in-linux-windows-11/ This said, Linux has fewer programs for some purposes, but they're free, open source [and so more trustworthy], and sometimes far less limited and locked-in. #Windows is there to farm you. Moo-oo. #FOSS is there to enable you.

Yes. The illustration may have been intended humorously. But it strikes close to home for me. There were never any "Good Old Days" in the U.S. U.S. history is full to the rim with grim. However, there was a moment in the past century when we stood on the brink of change. There was a chance for a future. The moment was 1979. The Vietnam War was over. Nixon was gone. The idea that people had rights was no longer treated as a fantasy. There were still problems, such as the 2nd Energy Crisis. But, just for a moment, we were at a turning point. Then came Reagan. Donald Trump is nothing. The destruction that he's wrought has been as avatar of the ugly side of the ape that is the species. We refer to it as the modern term #MAGA but it's always been there. The ape has picked up an orange hammer and has smashed things to pieces; chee-cheeing with glee as innocents are crushed in the rubble. Ronald Reagan was different. He was no more intelligent than Donald Trump. In his final term, he was, in fact, gone. He believed, literally and this is no parody, that he was physically on a movie set playing a role. But where Donald Trump is a brutal ape, Ronald Reagan is a more refined and chilling portrait of evil. He was the end of the America that could have been. Trump is simply the simian rampaging among the ruins. Utinam ne hoc accidisset. At this time when Donald #Trump is raging ineffectively at Iran to distract attention from his sexual activities with children, it's worth a moment to recall that #Reagan supplied the #Iran revolutionaries with weapons in exchange for U.S. hostages and thereby helped them to consolidate their power. Illustration: Cover of issue #2 of "Reagan's Raiders", a 1980s comic book series. Note: This isn't GenAI. IIRC I owned a copy of this issue decades ago.

No, but my Linux distro includes a boss key because, why not. [See screenshot.] Actually, I think that this is referred to as a "Show Desktop" button, but I'm not sure that I see the difference. In the 1990s, my CEO at IPT would have been outraged if he'd thought that people were sneaking game time on the sly. But I don't recall that he minded when we set up the office openly, just for a few days, so that everybody could blast away in Doom. I think that we even ran extra cables. We must have used DOS TCP packet drivers. The details are lost to time, but I remember that it worked pretty well. A young developer named Leon, now an aging CEO in Norway, brought his two daughters to the office for a visit. We booted up a DOS game called "Katie's Farm" for them and they apparently talked for days about picking strawberries in the game. Nobody minded that. However, if somebody had been caught using a boss key, that would have been the end of them. I thought of boss keys, myself, primarily as humor. Wouldn't an approaching boss see you move quickly to hit just the one key? I suppose that somebody with nerves of steel would be able to bluff their way through it. Link to a copy of Katie's Farm: https://tinyurl.com/katies-farm Screenshot: Boss key in #Laclin Linux with the desktop running BEWorld, a video game that has the distinction of being written entirely in Tcl [even the music data and other assets]. #DOS #games

I was raised Fundie but Thank God I'm an Atheist. I'd like to add the footnote that, in the U.S., "After-School Satan" is doing good work. Their charter is to provide an alternative to hatred-based Fundie indoctrination and I way support that. I rather like "Satan's Guide to the Bible" as well. Satanism may have cults comparable to those found among the Fundies. Note: I'm qualified to say that the latter are a murderous lot indeed. But I feel that Satanism in general is more nuanced and far healthier than Fundamentalism. In short, Make Mine Satan, Stan, Satan isn't an Also-Ran, Of Satan I am a Fan. FWIW Here's the link to "Satan's Guide to the Bible": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8j3HvmgpYc

Or perhaps the following may be relevant: https://garethstack.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/accelerando.pdf