smallerdemon

My spouse has a background in engineering and health sciences and is an Excel fan. I do IT support, and I kind of hate Excel, but I kind of love Apple's Numbers app.

"These effortless pleasures, these ready-made distractions that are the same for every one over the face of the whole Western world, are surely a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were."

Well... this aged like fine milk in retrospect to what was coming 20 years down the line.

If there's one thing we've learned in the past year is that curly haired men named Sam in the tech industry claiming that they are doing it "for the good of all humanity" probably ain't doin' -anything- for the good of humanity.

57 pages in before we get a single screenshot. In a lot of ways, I miss this kind of weird ass writing about introducing people to computers with so little previous context to computing.

OTOH, 57 pages in before we start telling us how to use it seems like the fore bearer of 2023 recipes on web pages: "I love chocolate chip cookies. My mother used to make them for me back in 1970s after a day out in the late fall. My mother died in the late fall in 1986, and that is the year I set out to recreate my mother's cookie recipe for myself."

I also hate it. My hatred stems from the fact that it's very much a tech bro ideology. They get it into their head that THEIR system is 'the one'. It's the same way that tech bro weirdos running startups get it in THEIR head that THEIR product is some sort of life changing piece of technology that every human on the planet is going to ultimately adopt once they just "understand it". And god forbid if the product does catch on, because then it's a horrific confirmation bias to them. So instead of luck and market coercion, the product's success is evidence of their brilliance.

I know that seems like a weird conclusion to get to from this, but having read a LOT of these types of articles over the years and seeing people's convictions and deep seated beliefs about their categorization systems, it really underscores a lot of how humans get it in their heads about their POV of the world is the 'right one' that the rest of the world should get on board with.

Yeah. All systems like this have to account for ad-hoc additions. Otherwise you will often jam a few squares into some circles just to accommodate your categorization system.

Is this the one that was speculated on as being a hoax / joke?

Same.

This is my head canon for how birthing of babies happened in The Matrix.

Yeah, if you find an honest dentist in 2023 in the United States, never, ever go to anyone else. Thank GOD I found one recently. After a cross country move I put off going to the dentist for FIVE years because my previous dentist was amazing. The first one I tried was a bizarre Christian cult with a bunch of chi-chi crap in the lobby, and contemporary Christian music that -the dentist hummed along to while working on my teeth-. And then the calls started "You need X, Y, Z and probably A, B and C." and I was like "Nah. Fuck right off." Two more years without, and FINALLY found a guy who was like "You're teeth are fine. We'll keep an eye on some of these, but only worry about them if they cause you pain or have sudden changes." Guy is a gem.

Fingers crossed that it can actually be replicated in future studies and research. We definitely don't want another nearly 20 years of false path ass busting research based on falsified documentation like we ended up with on Alzheimer studies.

As dumb as it always comes across, telling people to reboot their systems after nearly 25 years in IT support is something we're still doing to this day. And we're still doing it because it works more often than not when someone is calling about performance problems. Why? It's not unusual to see uptime numbers in the 300s or longer for some people.

We all have that story. One was someone I work with telling my his laptop was interminably slow and unusable and wondering what he could do to fix it. First question: "How often do you restart it?" Him: "What do you mean?" Me: "You know, turn it off and back on, or just select restart." Him: "Oh, I've never done that ?" Me: "Hm. How long have you had it?" Him: "Four years."

Four years without a reboot. The next week when I saw him and asked him if restarting it helped: "Yes! It's running like new again!"

My analogy for this is simple: Do you clean your house? Yes. Do you do it intentionally? Like, you know, set out to do it? Or does it just 'happen' passively without you doing anything at all? (Paying someone else to do it not withstanding.) Most people actively, intentionally clean. But you know what they don't do? Actively, intentionally get it dirty. Getting dirty is a passive action of living; of just existing and functioning. It's the same for your computer. Using it causes clutter that a reboot will clean up. But you have to do the reboot intentionally.