any failures in autonomy immediately engage a tele-operator

One of the problems is that these “failures in autonomy” could include a failure to engage a tele-operator when one is needed.

I originally sold my app on Beyond.com (which was originally software.net). They took 10% which didn’t seem too bad. One day they contacted me about giving my app a “freebate” – basically the app was still $29.95 but buyers could fill out a form and send it in and eventually (like months later) get their $29.95 back. Per their data only about half of buyers ever bothered to do this so it was effectively a 50% off deal. Beyond.com was supposed to give me about $10 per copy sold instead of the normal $27 to cover the freebate and they would make $5 per copy instead of their normal $3.

I said OK and they featured my app on their front page and sales went up like 100X and I was of course pretty happy. The funny part was that their accounting system was all fucked up and I kept getting $27 per copy sold even though the freebate was still in place. I actually tried contacting them multiple times about this to get the situation corrected and I could never get through to anybody who had any clue about what was going on. Eventually they went bankrupt and shut down and years later I got one of those class-action settlement checks in the mail without any explanation of what it was for. Maybe sales of my app were even better than they were telling me, I dunno. I’ve never once met a person in the real world who has ever even heard of the app so that doesn’t seem very likely.

He does like to launch into racist rants, but sometimes you just gotta hold your nose and swallow.

It’s wild, I released a shareware music creation app for Windows back in 2000 and it was easy to get people to pay $29.95 for it. I now have a vastly superior iOS version and nobody’s willing to pay a dollar for it. It’s a very depressing situation for an independent developer.

I had my sewer line backing up into my basement a couple of months ago. My regular plumber was busy so I had to call in a company that I knew was an overpriced scam (“Dream Team” lol) but I had no choice since I had guests in the house for my father’s funeral. They came and of course they couldn’t clear the line and said they had to dig up and replace the whole thing. The guy had a special tablet that he showed me the three options and the prices on and it initially showed them all in dollars per month with “zero-interest financing”. I was like dude just show me the total cost. The three options were $17K, $22K and $36K total but the monthly payments actually decreased with increasing total price (naturally the payment option didn’t show how many total payments you would have to make).

Fortunately I called my regular plumber and he was so outraged at these motherfuckers that he came out that afternoon and cleared my line for me. Total cost $850.

I mean, it doesn’t have anything to do with the movie Groundhog Day in which the main character relives Groundhog Day over and over again? I don’t think anybody used “groundhog day” as a synonym for “personal time loop” before the movie.

Well, I surprised myself by making it through the first video, at least. It was interesting to hear the guy ripping on the “hide the menus” concept as hard as I’ve always done. That shit drove me berserk when it came out.

You didn’t even mention the ribbon lol.

100% Ballmer is yakked out on coke.

I started working as a professional programmer in the mid-90s when three-tiered design was all the rage: a data access layer, a business logic layer, and a presentation layer. It seems that nobody actually knew what “business logic” was even supposed to be, because I kept inheriting projects where all the middle tier did was hand data objects from the data layer to the UI. In theory this prevented the UI from being fundamentally bound to the data access, but all three layers were always written in Visual Basic which got kicked to the curb in a few years anyway.

My pet theory is that Musk was installed at Tesla by the Saudis (who apparently have a bit of money) to destroy the very idea of electric cars by putting out as bad and overpriced a product as possible. Despite his best efforts, people still want the goddamn things.

I wonder if my old app circa 2000 would actually run on Linux/Wine. One of my projects for this winter is to install Linux on one of my Windows laptops. I’ll have to give the old app a try.

It was originally written as a C DLL utilized by a Visual Basic front end. The C DLL used the Win95 API, though, so it wouldn’t have worked on anything but Windows 95 and onwards. I subsequently ported the entire thing to C# but still using the same API to do the actual playing of the audio (I experimented with using DirectSound instead but that was really not appropriate for an application doing its own audio mixing). Now I’m working on an iOS version and I couldn’t give two fucks about Windows at this point.

As a programmer, it’s pretty wild how much of Windows under the hood has remained completely unchanged. I started writing software synthesizer applications back in the late '90s, using a part of the Win95 API called “winOutX”. The functions are kind of clunky to use but they allow you to programmatically create your own audio buffer arrays filled with whatever sounds you’re up to creating and dump them into the playback stream for seamless audio. This shit has remained in place, working pretty much perfectly, for the last 30 years. It was even there in WinCE/Windows Mobile, which allowed me to write software synthesis applications for early smartphones circa 2005. And it’s still all there today.

I like to rip on MS as much as the next guy (not least for them completely dropping the fucking ball as far as smartphones were concerned), but sometimes their incredibly long-term conservatism can work to your benefit.

Crows are complex, though. The ones that live around my house can often be found ganging up and chasing away the red-tailed hawks that like to snack on the squirrels. The squirrels repay the favor by chasing off the crows who come to eat the peanuts I leave out for them (and eating the peanuts themselves). One time the crows flew around above me making a godawful racket until I went to the back yard and freed a baby raccoon that had accidentally gone into the box trap I leave out for groundhogs; they immediately flew off as soon as I let the little guy out.

In my opinion, the rightward correction has gotten even worse since the defunding. For a long time now they’ve run a graphic showing their corporate sponsors before each broadcast (Meta and oil companies often show up there). They love to say it’s “viewers like you” that make them possible, but I think the corporate sponsors are a lot more important. It’s been a very long time since the government funding has even been that big a chunk of their income.

I don’t watch PBS News Hour but my parents do and I have to listen to it from time to time. They characterized this issue as one of Grok creating “explicit” AI images and artificially generating pictures of real women (not “girls”) in “bathing suits”. Not exactly an accurate characterization of CSAM.

Escort carriers?

Obligatory.

I could easily do it but my bladder has other plans.