vord's recent activity

  1. Comment on Disney is staring down the barrell of a no good, very bad year in ~movies

    vord
    Link Parent
    Yea but those who do are very whiney. They tend to be the same people worked up about seeing a gay person on screen.

    few people care about this

    Yea but those who do are very whiney. They tend to be the same people worked up about seeing a gay person on screen.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on Disney is staring down the barrell of a no good, very bad year in ~movies

    vord
    Link Parent
    I'm there. I need to ask for a 30% raise to be back where I was standard-of-living wise circa 2020. The belt has been ever-tightening since Covid, but decreased personal costs (no transit passes,...

    Anecdotally I don't know anyone that hasn't been hit by the increase to the cost of living, and our social activities are reverting back

    I'm there. I need to ask for a 30% raise to be back where I was standard-of-living wise circa 2020. The belt has been ever-tightening since Covid, but decreased personal costs (no transit passes, outings, etc) made up for it, then with this inflation spiral my real out of pocket costs are up 20% from baseline, paired with an increased property tax bill.

    4 votes

  3. Comment on What is Metamodernism? The era that follows postmodernity in ~humanities

    vord
    Link Parent
    ...What? Good comics can and do bear their hearts and souls on stage (see Mohammed Amer). Maybe I'm just a cranky old man, but if it's cringe to be genuinely heartfelt with an audience then maybe...

    ...What?

    He could have opened with a heartfelt moment to apologise to the fans and explain that he’d been having some troubles with mental health. But he couldn’t do that because that would be cringe.

    Good comics can and do bear their hearts and souls on stage (see Mohammed Amer). Maybe I'm just a cranky old man, but if it's cringe to be genuinely heartfelt with an audience then maybe that's a problem.

    Good comedians do use irony to twist the knife a bit, and hopefully triggers something deeper inside that causes introspection afterwards.

    I swear, it's just another layer of icing on the multitier irony/sarcasm cake in an attempt to seem deep.

    Maybe thats why I find straightforward communication a breath of fresh air.

    The whole "ironically wearing stuff from BP" from a bit ago also grated on me. Much like bigotry, ironic advertising is still advertising.

    4 votes

  4. Comment on Electric cars prove we need to rethink brake lights in ~tech

    vord
    Link Parent
    I do like automatic cruise, much nicer than the traditional one (though I would love 'ecocruise' which would peg it to a desired fuel economy on the tach more than speed). I think you're mostly...

    I do like automatic cruise, much nicer than the traditional one (though I would love 'ecocruise' which would peg it to a desired fuel economy on the tach more than speed).

    I think you're mostly right in many ways. For me the stick stuff all became second nature, except that it made me pay more attention to the topography of the road. I really wish hybrids had more 'space' on the pedal to serve as more of a neutral.

    It's probably selection bias, but every driver I know whom drove stick shift for at least a few years is markedly a better driver than those who didn't. Much like computing, I think ease of access overly facilitates lazy, half-ass usage. Less of a problem on a computer than heavy machinery.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on Electric cars prove we need to rethink brake lights in ~tech

    vord
    Link
    Just a quick hot take: It doesn't matter, most Americans still don't realize that going 25 mph consistently in a traffic jam is better than accellerating to 50 mph for 500 feet then slamming the...

    Just a quick hot take:

    It doesn't matter, most Americans still don't realize that going 25 mph consistently in a traffic jam is better than accellerating to 50 mph for 500 feet then slamming the brakes.

    They also mostly don't care about safe dricing distances, no amount of brake lights will save you if you're not at least a 5 count distance from the car in front of you.

    4 votes

  6. Comment on Electric cars prove we need to rethink brake lights in ~tech

    vord
    Link Parent
    I mourn the death of the manual in the USA. I was a much better driver when I had one. Forces you to pay attention in a way n automatic does not.

    I mourn the death of the manual in the USA. I was a much better driver when I had one.

    Forces you to pay attention in a way n automatic does not.

  7. Comment on Tally of covid-19 cases after CDC conference climbs to 181 in ~health

    vord
    Link Parent
    Touching a mask, more than anything, is about risk of breaking the seal. The disposable N95 was also not designed to be worn for more than a few minutes at a time.

    Touching a mask, more than anything, is about risk of breaking the seal.

    The disposable N95 was also not designed to be worn for more than a few minutes at a time.

  8. Comment on Tally of covid-19 cases after CDC conference climbs to 181 in ~health

    vord
    Link Parent
    When I say amateurs, I'm saying "not an active, practicing doctor." If its not fit-tested, its an amateur job.

    When I say amateurs, I'm saying "not an active, practicing doctor."

    If its not fit-tested, its an amateur job.

    2 votes

  9. Comment on Tally of covid-19 cases after CDC conference climbs to 181 in ~health

    vord
    Link Parent
    Mind that the masking, for amateurs, does more to prevent the wearer from transmitting than it does preventing them from catching. Especially if they do something like touching it with bare hands....

    Mind that the masking, for amateurs, does more to prevent the wearer from transmitting than it does preventing them from catching. Especially if they do something like touching it with bare hands.

    I'd bet if magic perfect data could be collected, there would be minimal, if any, improvement for catching it. But if anyone was infected who did wear a mask, they would have infected fewer people than an infected not wearing one.

    5 votes

  10. Comment on How do you decide if a piece of music is good? in ~music

    vord
    Link Parent
    My favorite album purchase of all time, was buying "Has Been" by William Shatner and Ben Folds on CD out of the Rap section in the record store. A fantastic album, and shows that a brilliant...

    My favorite album purchase of all time, was buying "Has Been" by William Shatner and Ben Folds on CD out of the Rap section in the record store.

    A fantastic album, and shows that a brilliant musician can bring out the best in even the worst singers (no offense Will).

    1 vote

  11. Comment on Where do you see the future of IT going? in ~tech

    vord
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    To reply to you and @skybrian... Yes. However, part of the reason I chose C++ is because that was what was taught in our Introduction to Programming class in 1997, early high school. In a the...

    To reply to you and @skybrian...

    Yes. However, part of the reason I chose C++ is because that was what was taught in our Introduction to Programming class in 1997, early high school. In a the middle of a fairly poor red-state school district where the majority went on to be blue collar. And there were kids whom were C students, whose highest grades were in metal shop. Who couldn't tell between the monitor and the PC when asked. And they ended the class with a B. Solving problems in the same vein as Advent of Code.

    Imagine a world where solving Advent of Code was a high-school skill. We could have had that world. Instead we shot for mediocrity and the educators and politicians of the USA incorrectly assumed that using a computer would continue to neccessitate to know how to fix it, that the technological prowess of the late X/early millenials was a natural progression and not a fluke of widespread, but difficult to use, computers.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on Where do you see the future of IT going? in ~tech

    vord
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Much like anything, its as complex as you want it to be. Sure a makefile can be a giant complex monstrosity. It can also just be a really easy way to run a series of shell commands. The great lie...
    • Exemplary

    Much like anything, its as complex as you want it to be.

    Sure a makefile can be a giant complex monstrosity. It can also just be a really easy way to run a series of shell commands.

    The great lie is that command line tools are harder than gui tools. They are just harder and easier in different ways. And since most people are trained on a GUI as an end user, its harder for them to grok, because they try to map GUI skills onto CLI skills, and learning any new skill is harder than one you already know.

    Here, a tutorial:

    hi:
    echo "hello"
    echo "world"
compile:
    g++ -o main.exe hello.cpp

    And off through an intro to C++ book. Run make compile when you need to. You don't need anything more than that, any more you need to learn how to use "=SUM()" in Excel. Those other things come as you progress.

    If you sit down a person who can read and write fluently, but has never seen a computer, I'd bet a nickle you could teach them the basic command line tools faster than how to use a mouse. I've seen it with my own eyes.

    Edit: to adopt a more accpeted idiom: Learning math and learning to read are not intrinsically easier or harder. Just different.

    Edit 2: And Excel itself is easier to learn if you can program, because you know that SUM() is a function and how parameters work.

    1 vote

  13. Comment on Where do you see the future of IT going? in ~tech

    vord
    Link Parent
    There's a chance this happens anyway when the people who designed x86 (and maybe x86_64) die. There is a lot of voodoo going on under the hood, and some of it is almost certainly lost already. At...

    imagine if we lose the ability to make OLED displays or high-performance CPUs.

    There's a chance this happens anyway when the people who designed x86 (and maybe x86_64) die. There is a lot of voodoo going on under the hood, and some of it is almost certainly lost already. At least in terms of "why and how," if not the implementation.

    6 votes

  14. Comment on Where do you see the future of IT going? in ~tech

    vord
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    This is why the education system failed. Its not harder to learn to use Make and a C compiler than it is to learn Excel and Word, it is just different. Over the course of my K-12 education 30+...

    Tooling is painful and there is too much prerequisite domain knowledge. The barrier to entry is still high.

    This is why the education system failed. Its not harder to learn to use Make and a C compiler than it is to learn Excel and Word, it is just different. Over the course of my K-12 education 30+ years ago, I attended 4 mandatory Microsoft Office classes, but 0 mandatory programming classes. (had to go to college in 11th to get beyond the elective Intro to Programming)

    The more complex tooling is courtesy of the IT/CS industry catering to college grads exclusively. If the average programmer only completed high school I'd bet the average programming language would be easier to use.

    1 vote

  15. Comment on It’s time to tax vehicles for weighing too much—even if they’re electric in ~finance

    vord
    Link Parent
    Sadly is the state of affairs. Everyone wants the benefits of beuracracy but not the expense. The car infrastructure we built is not sustainable, it's going to crumble eventually. We're just...

    Sadly is the state of affairs. Everyone wants the benefits of beuracracy but not the expense.

    The car infrastructure we built is not sustainable, it's going to crumble eventually. We're just starting to see the burden of the explosion that happened in the 60s through 80s. We thought our taxes were high before...

  16. Comment on Where do you see the future of IT going? in ~tech

    vord
    Link
    I have many thoughts of various positive and negative connotations. For one, computers are complicated, fragile, fickle things. They can and do break, and even the best identical-configuration...

    I have many thoughts of various positive and negative connotations.

    For one, computers are complicated, fragile, fickle things. They can and do break, and even the best identical-configuration tooling still will result in odd, irreproducable behaviors. The need for IT will be around as long as computers are incapable of repairing, replacing, and upgrading themselves.

    IT trends thus far have been quite cyclical. Cloud vs On-prem is far older than many think...Remoting to other services has been around as long as networking itself.

    The push to the latest iteration, vendor specific cloud services, could be the deathknell for it, given the nature of making it easy to get in and hard to get out. This worries me as it gives Google, Amazon, and Microsoft even more power to control the direction of the industry. Especially Microsoft, whom was able to make Teams a thing not because of its superior quality but by bundling it with their other stuff and making it "free." The hooks they have into the education system make vertical integration from them even more problematic than Apple's. There's a reason Wordperfect died even though it was just as good, if not better, than Word.

    I do think AI tooling is improving, and for art in particular its problematic. Programming/IT is more transitive with this shift, but art was already undervalued and being able to hurt the economics of artists (musicians/writers inclusive) is going to be a problem. I think AI will lose its appeal when costs go up as electricity costs do (and people get locked into their cloud-provider's AI).

    Companies still fail to use ERP systems correctly, and they've been around my whole life. I have my doubts that any newer tech will fix this fundemental problem. Amazing tools are no good if nobody uses them.

    Technological competance across the population of computer users is abysmal. The education and industry failed. The adoption of computers into the workplace should have turned everyone into programmers. If you can comprehend "If this, then that," you can learn to program.

    I forsee a great dropoff in knowledge when the 30+ crowd retires. I think the industry will recover, but there will be a period of pain there that was not felt prior.

    I firmly believe open source (specifically copyleft) software is the only proper tool for user empowerment. In a world run by software, user empowerment is the only way to insure that the stuff you buy is yours.

    I hope that we see a future where everyone takes on a blue collar trade, like plumbing, and a knowledge job like accounting or IT. Neither job would be fulltime year round, but wax and wane based on need.

    4 votes

  17. Comment on It’s time to tax vehicles for weighing too much—even if they’re electric in ~finance

    vord
    Link Parent
    When I was young and dumb, I thought DUI laws were oppressive. Now I see its the people drinking and driving are just straight wrong. I'm OK with your life being ruined for drinking and driving....

    When I was young and dumb, I thought DUI laws were oppressive.

    Now I see its the people drinking and driving are just straight wrong. I'm OK with your life being ruined for drinking and driving.

    Some prison time for my drinking and driving in my youth would have done me some good I think.

    2 votes

  18. Comment on It’s time to tax vehicles for weighing too much—even if they’re electric in ~finance

    vord
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Sounds like a lot till you break it down. If an employee can do 10 30 minute tests in an 8 hour shift (3 hours of downtime), you need about 13,000 employees for the entire nation, or 254 per...

    Sounds like a lot till you break it down.

    If an employee can do 10 30 minute tests in an 8 hour shift (3 hours of downtime), you need about 13,000 employees for the entire nation, or 254 per state. My state alone has over 20 centers, so could handle the burden with less than 15 hires per center.
    A small price to pay for the chance to lower the 102 traffic fatalities a day.

    For the utilitarians, at the rough estimate of a human life being worth $1 million (on the low end), that's $37 billion being lost annually for something that is readily preventable by forcing people to be better drivers.

    2 votes

  19. Comment on It’s time to tax vehicles for weighing too much—even if they’re electric in ~finance

    vord
    Link Parent
    I'll counter with this: If they can't make a 30 minute appointment once every 5 years, maybe they shouldn't be operating a 2 ton hunk of machinery. The damage these things do even at slow speeds...

    I'll counter with this:
    If they can't make a 30 minute appointment once every 5 years, maybe they shouldn't be operating a 2 ton hunk of machinery.

    The damage these things do even at slow speeds is ridiculous. Maybe people will learn to pay attention instead of fiddling with their phones if the punishment is more onerous than a fine. Frankly I think its more fair than a $200 fine because the rich can't escape it.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on It’s time to tax vehicles for weighing too much—even if they’re electric in ~finance

    vord
    Link Parent
    I like the idea of more restrictive licensing, period. Make owning cars onerous enough you only want to do it if you need to. Golf cart? Whatever. Sedan? Renew with in person test every 5 years....

    I like the idea of more restrictive licensing, period. Make owning cars onerous enough you only want to do it if you need to.

    Golf cart? Whatever.
    Sedan? Renew with in person test every 5 years.
    SUV? Annual written exam as well

    Any moving violations? Mandatory drivers ed course.

    2 votes