nmcfarl
Joined 19 years ago
Joined 19 years ago
I agree with the proposition that people are horrible at halfway autonomy.
But I am horrible at driving, and I kind of think almost everybody is. I have a car that just does lane keeping and distance keeping cruise control. The number of times it is notified me that I’m sliding off the side of the road is large. Similarly it’s let off the gas a vast number of times when I was creeping up on the car in front of me and I didn’t notice.
Maybe it’s having just one long, largely empty commute for five years. But I suspect it’s that you can drive any modern car without 100% concentration at which point people are prone to getting distracted.
So I’m thinking the comparison should be halfway autonomy vs a modern “dumb” car and I think halfway autonomy is safer overall.
And for me, it is boring and painful AND useful. And took weeks to start to show any benefits at all. Sort of like going to the gym. And people should know that that is a common thing, that you might hate meditation practice but still find it useful and continue.
My solution to this problem is to set these books next to one of the two comfy chairs in the house. When I sit in one of these chairs, I consider whether I want to read a chapter, I can only read one chapter, I can only have two of these books going at one time.
And under the system it takes me about three months to finish one of the books up from less than a week. I also find I no longer hate• most of them and I learn a lot more.
• they still have a very high DNF rate.
I think there are jobs where you need lots of context and there are jobs where other things are more important.
In my day - I think it was around 2000 – I was handed a 5000 line perl script that both responded to CGI bin requests to run a store and kicked off fulfillment of the orders. Inside that script, it had two 1500 line long subroutines that sometimes navigated internally via goto.
We refactored, and added new features while a profitable business ran on top of the code. You don’t get quite the velocity you do on good code, but it’s manageable.
However, even after my third revision of the notes – to just remove them entirely – deliveries didn’t pick up again, so I don’t know. It’s opaque to me.
I used to be a big user of Amazon prime, but they recently swapped over to logistics for my rural area which has no cell service and huge distances between houses and that apparently means they can’t deliver. They try and packages sit at the local warehouse for a couple of weeks before being sent back to Amazon.
Originally, some drivers would be foolish enough to try to come up here without cell, but by and large, they were unable to find the property- mainly because the house is not visible from the road, even if the mailbox is on the road, and mapping apps do a bad job. So I’m assuming the drivers don’t get paid or in some other way get punished and this means that a bunch of Christmas presents didn’t show up, and we stopped using Amazon entirely.
Since that we’ve already had a problem with one vendor we purchased from directly that tried to send something to us via Amazon logistics, and it got returned to them. This was not mentioned on the webpage, and when we contacted them, they got really angry with us for giving them an “undeliverable address” – they literally did not want to give us a refund. They really didn’t like: It’s deliverable by USPS, UPS, and FedEx as a response. But eventually, we got a refund.
I’m assuming this is going to be my future more and more now.
I think most people over the age of 25 can do this maybe 80% of the time. And most of them can keep it under control enough that they only look a little dysfunctional, the other 20% of the time. (although I definitely know a few extroverts who don’t look dysfunctional, they look like the life of the party – but that’s them being dysfunctional and stressing out and trying to make everyone love them. That’s their 20%.)
Before MagSafe, this used to kill phones. Now my son has a phone without a port, but it’s not dead.
I routinely blocked by Cloudflare from viewing things and occasionally, I am blocked from buying things. Just this weekend, it was $100 worth of athletic wear. I just keep clicking the box and it never lets me complete the purchase. After the 7th or 10th time I go and find another vendor that would actually sell to me. I was more annoyed than usual because the website already had my credit card at this point – but as this article proves there are reasons to block an order even with a credit card.
Then Windows 95 came out and I actively hated it, but did think it was amazingly pretty - somehow this was the impetus for me to get a pc again, which I put Windows NT on. Which was profitable for freelance gigs in college. Soon after that, I dual booted it to Linux and spent most of my time in Slackware.
After that, I graduated and had enough money to buy a second rig, which I installed OS/2 warp on - which was good for side gigs. And I really liked. A lot. But my day job required that I have a Windows NT box to shell into the Solaris servers as we ran. Then I got a better class of employer and the next several let me run a Linux box to connect to our solaris (or Aix) servers.
Next my girlfriend at the time got a PowerBook G4 and installed OS X on it. It was obviously amazing. Windows XP came out, and it was once again so much worse than Windows NT - and crashed so much more - which was odd as it was based on Windows NT. (yes 98 was before this but it was really bad). Anyhow, right about here the Linux box I was running at home, died. And it was obvious that I was not going to buy an XP box, so I bought my first Mac.
And it’s been the same for the last 25 years - every time I look at a Windows box it’s horrible. I pretty much always have a Linux box headless somewhere in the house, and one rented in the cloud, and a Mac for interacting with the world.
And like the parent I actively dislike windows. And that’s interesting because I’ve liked most other operating systems I’ve used in my life, including MS-DOS. Modern windows is uniquely bad.
Not that they likely will, as Apple owns the framing.
I have a friend who will say things like “I have to go at 3” and get up at 3 on the dot without even looking at her watch/phone. I’m not that guy and I need buzzers, timers, and ambient displays all working together anything done at a time.
Coder and Founder. Union County, OR
https://castingwords.com
https://nmcfarl.org
[email protected] - feel free to drop me a line.