Frankly, I have enormous respect for #YouTube creators who can record their presentations -- whether complicated or simply expounding directly to camera for 5, 10, 15 minutes or even longer at a stretch, with few or in some cases even zero cuts, especially vastly annoying jump cuts. In my opinion, jump cuts are the realm of the amateur who is unwilling to take the time to prepare a proper presentation for the public, irrespective of the topic.
Also, bonus points to creators who mic themselves properly, either with an off camera mic or a lav, and don't use those ridiculous in-frame giant microphones. Those microphones in frame are ludicrous.
Pretty much every time I start reading social media posts, I'm reminded of yet another reason why the Galactic Federation refuses to have anything to do with this planet.
@f1c6c5c3 You're kidding about this, right? Please tell me you're kidding that you're getting people telling you that black and white photos are "depressing". Please, please. You're kidding. Right?
@0c1a9324 By the way, I find your "vastly less carcinogenic/toxic/offensive to by-standers" comment to be way off the mark. The carcinogenic and toxic effects to both vapers and those around them are in dispute, but the offensiveness is even worse than tobacco in the experience of many. Have you already forgotten the pregnant woman begging Boebert to stop vaping in the theater and her refusing before she got thrown out? The camera showed the immense clouds of shit she was forcing everyone around her to breath.
As much as I despise cigarettes, the British proposal to increase the legal age for smoking year by year in an attempt to eventually ban them is inane. It will simply create a black market and cause far more damage in the end. This kind of prohibition never works and is beneath stupidity.
Emergency Alert Test FAIL for Wi-Fi Calling. As I suspected would be the case, it appears that the emergency alert test did not reach many (certainly not mine!) phones connected via Wi-Fi Calling without active cellular connectivity. This is a major hole, because Wi-Fi Calling is widely promoted by the carriers as a 100% compatible solution for voice, texts, and data when cellular connectivity is unavailable or unreliable.
You might want to forward this warning widely.
IN A FEW HOURS, the feds will test Emergency Alert System "Terror Trigger" including cellphones.
In a few hours, the federal government, in its infinite wisdom, will trigger an Emergency Alert System test likely to confuse and confound, if not trigger terror, for millions of people around the country. Not only will television and radio be included, but cellphones as well.
So, if you're driving down the freeway and your phone starts making alarming sounds and receiving surprise text messages, be sure not to reach for it to find out what the bloody hell is going on and in the process lose control of your vehicle.
Because yeah, no doubt the feds have REALLY thought this one through in terms of how it will impact people who aren't expecting it. The brain trust in action.
BREAKING: Republican Kevin McCarthy vacated from his position as House Speaker in historic House vote. This is the first time that a sitting Speaker has lost his position in this manner in the history of the United States. This leaves the House without a Speaker, and no other House business can be conducted until a new Speaker is in place.
In the absence of McCarthy reaching out to make a deal with them for rules changes or other concessions, Democrats in the House are reportedly united in a decision NOT to help him stay in the Speaker's seat. This means that the odds of McCarthy losing that seat today, while not certain, are quite high.
This would also paralyze the House (with just weeks until the next government shutdown deadline) until a new Speaker is in place -- no other House business can proceed.
As you may recall, McCarthy required 15 ballots over 4 days to become Speaker originally, the most ballots needed for a Speaker since before the Civil War.
Let's be clear about this. Not removing most hate speech and disinformation/misinformation are key aspects of Musk's #Twitter/X and his publicly stated philosophies, which also include his direct friendly public interactions with racists and fascists on the platform. Twitter is the main large platform that has refused to agree to the EU code of conduct and has now been told by the EU that it will be in violation of EU laws regarding these content types, unless changes are made.
Understandably, many firms are reluctant to advertise on Twitter for fear of brand contamination through general or specific association with disreputable Twitter content.
By making it possible for #Google Ad users to buy ads on Twitter by linking the Google and Twitter ad systems, Google is now explicitly aligning itself with Musk's philosophies and sensibilities, by providing new sources of income via Google systems to increase ad buys on Twitter, and so help continue to fund Musk's hate speech and disinformation operations.
The damage to Google's reputation -- whatever is left of it at this point -- could be enormous, especially when Google Ad users find their ads associated with the more horrific of Twitter posts.
This is a dark day indeed for Google. -L
Basically, #Google partnering with Musk's #Twitter/X to provide ad sales is analogous to signing a deal to provide new services to a criminal organization that you find distasteful, but hey, they're willing to pay you so you're happy to help keep them afloat. That's the sorry reality, no matter how Google tries to spin it.
Note that this is a NEW deal -- Google is now getting into bed with Musk eyes wide open -- unrelated to Twitter's much longer use of GCP (Google Cloud Platform) infrastructure services, which predate Musk's takeover, and so fall into a different category of considerations and possible future actions.
I have told my "aliens in the laundromat" story here, right? Many years ago I was doing laundry in a local laundromat and sitting waiting around for stuff to finish. Two seemingly ordinary guys walked in with a load of dirty laundry. One of them loaded a washer, closed it and stood their waiting. Then he tentatively pushed at the controls. "It doesn't function," he said to his companion. "You must insert terrestrial currency," his companion replied. They then proceeded to successfully do their laundry. Welcome to L.A.
OK, here's a mystery. It's Saturday. I see a couple of guys wearing orange vests get out of an ordinary, unmarked car in a residential area. They go to the middle of a quiet intersection, and with a hammer start banging a chisel into the asphalt. They may or may not have hit something hard after a few minutes (change in the sound, maybe). They inspect what they're doing, then brush back in the asphalt with their feet. And drive off. They couldn't have gone deep at all. Some kind of inspection? Outer space aliens implanting homing devices? Any ideas?
@0c1a9324@c8565328 I just now put a hold on the library ebook. Must be very popular, they've got 53 copies (that's quite high for ebooks) and I'm still in a position over 300. OK, now that's a book cover!
I see some people comparing the GOP leadership to "Bond Villains". This of course is entirely unfair to Bond Villains, who generally showed a great deal of intelligence and class.
Jimmy Carter, now in hospice, turns 99 this Sunday. He was arguably the most intelligent president this country has ever had. No other nuclear engineers on the list.
BREAKING: Texas Republican senators bring even more shame to their state by acquitting Ken Paxton of all articles (brought by state House Republicans) in his impeachment trial.
Handy Hint from the days of computer punched cards: Take a black marker and draw a DIAGONAL line from corner to corner across the long edge of your card deck. This creates a reference that can be very helpful with cards that don't have printed sequence numbers, in the unfortunate circumstance that the deck gets dropped on the floor. Seriously.
When I was an undergrad at UCLA, I already had advanced access to both the Campus Computing Network's (CCN) IBM 360/91 and the UCLA home-grown URSA high speed terminal system (which displayed full pages at a time on modified TVs, with 40 character lines -- two lines equals one punched card image!)
I was also already deeply involved in ARPANET and its very advanced hardware and systems at the first ARPANET site in UCLA's Boelter Hall. But that was a totally different world, and frankly we didn't talk about it much outside the lab since anti-government sentiments were running quite high during that time. Even the mere existence of the lab was not generally known to most people on campus.
Still, I had to take some required courses, including, yes, an introductory programming class! So basically, I was leading a double life as far as this stuff was concerned.
The vast majority of students and faculty at that time submitted their programs as batch jobs on punched cards to the 91 (there was some limited TSO Timesharing, APL, and a couple of Tektronix graphics displays, etc. hooked up to the 91 as well) -- most students and faculty never saw this stuff -- they submitted card decks and got printouts in return later (sometimes much later if the 91 went down, as it often did).
Anyway, so I had turn in these rudimentary PL/C programs even while I was doing all that ARPANET stuff. A very weird time.
The programs had to be turned in as printed source code and output listings along with their card decks. This presented a problem. I didn't want to spend hours around the hot, sweaty, rather disgusting CCN keypunch room to manually punch out decks, after waiting for an 029 to even become available.
So I had another way.
Using my URSA access (in a small, private, hidden math department terminal room), I wrote my programs on the URSA CRT displays, directly submitted them from URSA for execution and to generate printed listings, and then sent the source code to the 91's automatic card punch. Then I could just pick up the decks! Very cool.
But there was another problem. The 91 punched the cards, but did not print on them. So they were blank punched cards with no printing at the top of what was punched. I certainly couldn't turn those in like that.
There was a solution.
A couple of the 029 keypunches in that awful room were the special "interpretive" model. This meant you could load a fully punched deck and then set the unit to run them through fairly rapidly automatically, and the unit would print at the top of each card what the punched card punches contained.
The result was a perfectly ordinary looking deck to turn in.
One evening I was doing just that. Cards were automatically feeding, running across and getting printed, and being stacked up on the other side. I just wandered around the halls while this was going on, visiting the vending machines and the like.
When I returned to check on progress one of these times, I found a girl who was in my same programming class standing at the keypunch staring at the cards running through automatically.
"What is happening?" she asked in confusion.
I wasn't in a great mood that evening, so admittedly I was a bit less than gallant.
"Oh, I rigged the keypunch to do my programming for me automatically," I replied.
She looked stunned and hurriedly departed, while the cards continued to plow through the machine.
Just another day at UCLA, long ago. -L
It's hilarious how the GOP is so excited about gun charges against Hunter Biden, when their party line is that even domestic violence felons and even many mentally ill people should be encouraged to have guns and carry them openly wherever they go. The GOP is just a gang of criminal fascists now.
EXCELLENT! - #Google DOUBLES support period for many Chromebooks, from 5 years to 10 years!
Even many relatively older Chromebooks get a boost if released from 2019 onward. My 2020 unit just bumped from a June 2025 date to a June 2028 date.
You can check the dates for your model at: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366
Note that many older models show an asterisk explaining that they'll have to opt-in to the extended support. Exactly how that's done isn't clear at this time.
But great news. The limited support time for Chromebooks has always been a problem, so this makes an enormous difference!
Thanks Google!
FYI to #Apple users (I'm not one). I have a couple of little USB-C testers that dump all the relevant parameters of USB-C cables. You don't need to buy Apple's expensive cables. In fact, I find that many uber-cheap USB-C cables -- I mean Dollar Store level -- test out fine and work just great in practice. Don't let Apple's reality distortion field take you for a ride on this one.
***** Google Issues *****
So lately I've been asked why on some issues I've been very critical of #Google (e.g. their Generative AI deployments), and on other issues supportive of Google (e.g., the DOJ antitrust case). "Why can't you make up your mind?" seems to be the essence of such questions.
This really isn't complicated. I'm not a Google Hater. Actually quite the opposite. I have enormous respect for Google and especially for Googlers, many of whom I've had the opportunity to interact with over the years, both publicly and during intervals when I worked inside the firm.
But I call issues as I see them, and that means the good, the bad, and the ugly. I am NOT someone who wants to see Google fail. I want to see Google continue to succeed, but of course in ways that are best for its users and the world at large, as well as the company itself.
Google has now been on the scene for 25 years. It has reached a critical stage in its life cycle where many large firms have faltered. I don't want to see that happen to Google with the inevitable negative impacts on its users that would accompany such a fall.
So I discuss Google-related issues as I see them, for better or worse, in hopes of seeing the trajectory move overall in a positive direction for all the stakeholders involved.
That's the best I can do, and if that seems inconsistent to some onlookers, that's unfortunate, but it's the way it has to be.
Thanks. -L
Without a shadow of a doubt the single most useful class I ever took in school at any level, was TOUCH TYPING in Junior High. A room full of big old mechanical manual typewriters. Endless seemingly silly exercises.
At the time, my thinking was that it would be useful later for writing term papers and such. I of course had not an inkling that I would essentially spend my entire career chained to terminal and computer keyboards.
Speaking of Astro Boy. Many years ago I was on a technical tour of the Sony R&D facility in Tokyo where innovations like U-matic and Betamax were developed. Security, as you might imagine, was high.
I noticed something posted on a bulletin board that I remember to this day.
It showed Astro Boy walking along, with gears and other parts falling out of him in a trail, being followed by stereotypical spies gathering up the pieces behind him. There was a big notation in Japanese that I couldn't read, but the meaning was absolutely clear nonetheless!
A little hint on using #YouTube. If you take the time to train it by telling it what you like and dislike, the suggestion algorithms are usually amazingly accurate and useful. I virtually never see suggestions for stuff I'm not interested in, and never see any right wing crap suggested.
But if you don't login, or don't bother to train the system when you do login, you're much more likely to get random garbage to complain about.
It's reported that some MAGA supporters have come up with "brilliant" plan in case Trump is removed from ballots due to the 14th Amendment (which I consider to be unlikely in the extreme). But just in case ... their genius plan is to WRITE IN his name! Millions will write him in, they say.
The problem, of course, is that the 14th Amendment has nothing to do with ballots. It's a prohibition on Holding Office.
So yeah, not so swift a plan.
Trump now says he would ABSOLUTELY testify in his criminal trials. I utterly and completely support this sentiment. Don't let your lawyers talk you out of it, Donald. You just get on the witness stand and let it all out. Go to it!
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