Posts by jhaas@a2mi.social
(DIR) Post #ArHDo8Q8BOXpvGrevQ by jhaas@a2mi.social
2025-02-19T12:48:52Z
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@feliks Or the related fetish against slashed letters I had to deal with in computer science classes years ago. Worry about confusion with:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_sign
(DIR) Post #B0GyzehmduHRrNQ3yi by jhaas@a2mi.social
2025-11-15T14:51:45Z
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@futurebird @gbargoud Having grown up in Northern Michigan, I've mostly lived in a personal car world for most of my life. But I've also traveled enough to be places where personal cars are not only redundant, but inconvenient.The thing that felt alien my first time in cities with public transit wasn't transit like train or subway. It was incidental reliance on taxis. These days ride apps change the experience.
(DIR) Post #B0H4OcAtgfxN1Rl32W by jhaas@a2mi.social
2025-11-15T15:52:18Z
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@futurebird I was working on document imaging software in the late 90s when that was a new thing. At a trade show, there was a vendor that was doing optical storage cards the size of a business card. That weird mix of a digital storage format integrated in a way that you were also expected physically file it reminds me of this quite a bit.
(DIR) Post #B0i1eQMCGlWVjAXstU by jhaas@a2mi.social
2025-11-28T15:58:46Z
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@futurebird For smaller pieces of art, the picture rails from IKEA shown elsewhere in thread is what some of my friends do. I've had two friends over the years solve the large art piece problem in a very old-fashioned way: picture rails. Rather than constantly having to fuss with holes in the wall to hang larger pieces, you simply tweak the cables hanging the art to the right height.
(DIR) Post #B1D2JNEindJNp3Ki3c by jhaas@a2mi.social
2025-12-13T15:02:12Z
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@futurebird The majority of the things we all enjoy online are created by individuals sharing things.Dealing with the asymmetry of discovering and providing access to those things are where we keep getting screwed. Providing scaled infrastructure at the individual level is no longer "difficult", but it's the place where the grifters insert themselves. Top this off with the infrastructure to deal with bad actors.
(DIR) Post #B1D4fnVc02oLaH3Nj6 by jhaas@a2mi.social
2025-12-13T15:28:40Z
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@futurebird Something else to add to your future list for what sounds like a good book is how some keyboard symbol combinations that may not make a lot of sense were workarounds. The most common example of this one is := as an assignment operator. We get this because the APL left arrow symbol didn't exist outside of that keyboard.Somewhere in the RFC series is a similar comment on why @ became used when it was one of the common characters across a number of different platforms.
(DIR) Post #B1ZsjwLEdi2Rn3F3q4 by jhaas@a2mi.social
2025-12-24T15:33:16Z
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@futurebird The property I think you're running into is "personal immediacy". Children do this when naming their toys. As adults, some of us do this for deeply personal things like their cars.Some people have had a similar "relationship" with the cutesy digital assistants of the day. Even more so when those relationships are personalized.LLMs lack that personal immediacy, IMO.
(DIR) Post #B2Ax1lIchQLSTTbheS by jhaas@a2mi.social
2026-01-11T12:45:40Z
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@futurebird My employer at the ISP I worked for in the 90s used to say that, "Working with computers requires a huge ego. The computer is always telling you that YOU ARE WRONG."The thing you're trying to teach is harder because it's two things at the same time: Learning how the language parser reports errors. The student learning to debug how they think. I've been coding for years. Parser errors are hard enough and are often obscure in some languages.