And then we graduated into the worst financial/employment crisis of the last 100 years.

Yeah, graduating high school in 2005 and thus finishing college in 2008 was…great. I’m not shotgun emoji about it at all.

Thing is, when we were in college, it looked like jobs and futures still existed, they waited until our last semester to destroy society. It never got better. Kids these days were born in the bullshit, we were merely adopted by it.

Also, you apparently don’t know the first fucking thing about the trades.

But they are allowed to debate.

Both are terrible for that. I hope that it’s a small number of people that get killed relying on LoRa for emergency communications that result in the project(s) being sued out of existence.

Hey guys, I’ve got a great idea: Let’s buy some $15 Arduino-like devices with milliwatts of transmitter power and trust them to life and limb! Even stupider than the people who buy Baofeng radios to put in a “bug out bag” and never use. Those at least mostly work.

Something something first amendment.

I’ve gotten into the habit at my grocery store of taking a cart from the corral into the store rather than walking in and then taking one from inside the building. It’s functionally no effort for me and its one less time a store employee has to walk that cart back into the building. The people who work at that grocery store are my neighbors and townsfolk, every cart I bring back in on my way is an opportunity for them to stand around on the company dime.

Ah the joys of tech debt.

1970s: Hardware configuration settings? All the chips are soldered down, there’s a port for a floppy drive and a port for a cassette drive. Write your software for the peripherals it needs.

Early 80s: So there are some expansion slots in the case, and a bank of 12 tiny DIP switches on the motherboard to set the configuration. Most of what it needs to know is how much RAM is installed.

Mid 80s: The computer comes with a diskette that has a program on it that will allow you to set the configuration in software, it’ll be stored in battery backed RAM in the RTC circuit.

Late 80s: We’re building that configuration UI into the firmware itself so you don’t need separate software. You can enter the BIOS config menu by pressing the F11 key before the OS boots.

Early 90s: F11? I thought it was F12!

Mid 90s: The company I bought my desktop from also makes compact laptops that don’t have a hardware F11 or F12 key, Those are Fn+F1 and Fn+F2, and the Fn key doesn’t work in the BIOS because it was implemented as an OS feature. So they use F2, and they use it on all the computers they make so they don’t have to maintain a special branch of the BIOS.

Late 90s: Okay so this is getting more important because we don’t just have two floppies and a hard drive now; “Try booting from A, Try booting from B, Try booting from C” starts to break when computers might have more than one hard drive and possibly more than one optical drive. We’re going to need to make that configurable.

Early 2000s: The old BIOS standard is starting to get long in the tooth, we’re basically shipping firmware designed 20 years ago. It needs a refresh called UEFI.

Mid 2000s: As part of that new standard, we’re going to standardize the key to enter the firmware config menu right? Right?!

Late 2000s: Our multimedia PC maps the function keys to media keys by default and you have to hold the fn key to actually throw an F1 through F12 keypress. Again that doesn’t work outside of Windows so we use the Delete key.

Early 10s: Booting from USB flash drives is a thing now, the whole drive is removable so there’s no realistic way to put “boot from USB drive” permanently ahead of the hard drive in the boot order, it would be handy to have a separate menu just to temporarily choose which drive to boot from. Since we use F11 for the settings menu, we’ll use F2 for the boot menu.

Mid 10s: We use F8 for that.

Late 10s: Hey, we could speed up boot times if we significantly shortened the duration during boot when its waiting for the user to do that, and print the instructions to the screen for less time than it takes to read.

Early 20s: What if we let you disable that menu entirely from within that menu, for the sake of skipping that delay entirely? Which also means you can’t get back into the menu to re-enable it?

Mid 20s: What if nobody could ever afford computers again? Wouldn’t that be fun?

Raspberry Pis have CEC support. I’ve used it with OSMC (formerly either LibreElec or RaspBMC, one of those? It’s Debian Kodi). It was much better without. So, if you turned the TV off with the TV’s power button, the Pi would turn the TV back on.

The Pi has a 3.5mm audio jack. I have a set of desktop PC speakers that are hell and gone better than anything built into a television in the last 20 years. Not only is it not straightforward to get it to control the Pi’s audio output level with the TV’s remote via CEC, OSMC absolutely did not want to do this. Not only would that setting get revered to HDMI audio out, it would disable the analog out option, and you’d have to SSH in and change a config file to re-enable that option in the first place. That would happen either during updates or even just power cycles. I swear the phraseology of the line you’d have to put in that config file would change; the same line I’d put in there would still be in there and not working.

The thing with open source software is, it’s always going to have the UX of a sinus infection, especially since the manufacturers of hardware gimp their devices to not work well outside of the walled garden.

Correct, if they had access to that regular beer, they’d just drink the regular beer and not bother diluting it.

Well how prominent will plumber’s putty or silly putty have the word Download on a page?

My town has a bulletin board posted adjacent to the sidewalk near the post office. It’s labeled “The Town Cryer” and fliers for local events, businesses etc. get posted there.

That is what I see the Twitter/microblog format as useful for. It’s for stand up comics and musical acts to post “come see us LIVE at the Somewhere Dome in Citytown This Saturday a 8/7c.” Or for ISPs to post “Service interruption in the Carolinas, repairs underway, expect service to resume at 9 pm.”

Other than that and it’s just All Old Men Yell At Cloud.

The peak was during the period you could say “If you search on Google for ___ you get ___.” Back when it was predictable. When they started personalizing results was the moment they sliced society’s brake lines.

I remember…I had a Windows 8.1 machine, I needed to SSH into a Raspberry Pi. No Powershell, no native SSH client, the easiest way to get one was to install PuTTY. So I googled “putty”. All lowercase, search engines sometimes get fucky when you start doing caps and punctuation, etc. I got an entire page of results for and about the TTY client, and nothing about drywall spackle or non-newtonian children’s toys. Because I often search for stuff like that, it made a bet and went all in.

The horrifying part of that is, that innocuous example makes it sound great. I didn’t have to overcome the “why did you name it that?” problem and refine the search by adding “tty client” or something like that. By getting to know me it took me to exactly what I wanted to find. When trying to find utility software, that’s okay. That’s not all people search the web for.

Now it’s hooked up to the “You’re right to call me out on that” machine, we’re sliding down the mountainside upside down on fire.

Eliminating reasonableness is the first step in creating an abusive legal system.

Those engineers probably had a job market with serious salaries to work for, and a course load relevant to that market. Kids these days live in a dying society with no hope. Why the fuck should they try? “Get a degree” is the quest. The assignment isn’t to learn something, it’s to get that fancy page. One of the required items is take some token bullshit art class. So we’ll do the one where we sit through movies.

The “go to college to become successful” thing is mostly bullshit; see there’s that community of people who were already going to be successful because their parents are, and what they get out of college is unsupervised time together with their peers. It’s not about Calculus 2 homework and Sociology lectures, It’s about not saying anything to your roommate’s girlfriend about the girl your roommate was fucking last night, the resulting bro-hood that earned, and your roommate becoming the district attorney in 12 years time. That’s what the people who are in congress got out of college. The thing is, you have to be one of them when you get there already.

Hell, I think the entire reason this ritual is academic-scented is because scholarship and science were a big fad with the elite about 300 years ago.

Actually walking the walk, going to school to learn the material the professors are teaching and getting a job in research or the professions will land you a job that pays marginally better than McDonald’s and a lifetime’s worth of debt. Doctors don’t get rich anymore. “Scientist” is the occupation of applying for grants. There’s no money to be had in actual academia…unless you’re owner of the school and teenage drinking buddy with the man who is now the governor.

College itself has very little to offer those who are planning to go get a job that doesn’t have some regulatory “it is a felony to do this job without a degree” requirement like lawyer, engineer or physician, but it has become a de facto societal requirement. Which has turned college into less of an educational experience and more of a trial to endure. And these kids are enduring it.

Both are content silos with begrudging PDA features.

So they’re 2/3 of the way to being nudists like the Sphynx. I hope that thin layer of down keeps them warm enough, I always feel bad for Sphynxes having to wear sweaters and such.

I’ve never met a Cornish Rex, is their fur the same texture as a “normal” shorthair just shorter, or is it like wirey or something?

Izzy’s got purple beans!

This one I dont’ get. Wasn’t Donkey Kong Land a Gameboy Color or Gameboy Advance port of Donkey Kong Country for SNES? So if you want higher quality graphics and sound…play DKC?

Very young kittens are definitely some work. Mama cats have their work cut out for them. You’ll have a ten pound best friend in no time.

For the point I’m making, that’s close enough.

I will sometimes play with the weirdest little electronics, like a smart outlet or something, and the damn thing will have a little Linux distro running out of Flash and there’s no room to install anything but it’s got Vi on it, often as part of Busybox or Toybox. Nano might not be installed, emacs almost certainly isn’t, Vi or Vim almost certainly WILL be in there. For if you ever need to edit wpa_supplicant.conf on your coffee maker. Because we live in a world that contains that hell sentence.