Scott Adams shaped my sense of humor and perspective on a lot of things. Even in later years, when I disagreed with him immensely on a lot of things, I found that there was a thread of insight in what he said regarding how people experience reality and the power of words and images. Ultimately I tuned out, but before I did I followed his line of inspiration (which he was very public about, often naming books and authors) for a lot of that and was not disappointed. I was grateful that the insight was again sincere, and learning them didn’t take me to the places I did not want to go — the places he himself seemed to sincerely enjoy.
It’s not hard for a lot of us to criticize who he became. He certainly had no shortage of criticism for others. I looked up to Scott a lot as a kid, and as an adult found him to be a man like any other, with limits and flaws… not merely in spite of his accomplishments, but often because of them. There’s a lesson there that I wish to carry too.
Whenever this stuff comes up I try to remind people that we only get to see a tiny little glimpse of what these folks were up to. Folks look at the stone tools that have only been found after their owners were done with them and left them in the ground for eons, and imagine that in general everything was “rough” and “crude.”
We don’t get to see the overwhelming majority of their craft — there’s no doubt a whole world of wood and leather artistry and so on that don’t get to survive. Humans are clever, adaptable and often times really fucking obsessive. That same instinct that makes one spend hundreds of hours on Factorio was around in prehistory, applying itself to whatever.
I often times hear anthropologists speculate that large stone handaxes were a means of seduction — that the girls would have swooned over the guys who were better able to make more effective tools. I know too many nerds to believe this. I think that back then, there were people who kept obsessing over making finer tools and theorizing about designs and where materials could be found, and it was about as sexually appealing as my homelab. Which is to say, absolutely fucking not, but who cares, I want to tell you about my idea for a subnet optimized to allow doomcoder agents to handle their own infra needs
Having a great hand axe might be more analogous to the boy with the “bitchin Camaro” to attract the girls. Or more recently, performance in a street takeover.
It’s really a shame how popular it was to mar shows with this… I saw a DVD set of a show once with a no-laugh-track version. It sucked because the actors pause for the laughs after each line. This is bad enough with the laugh track in place, but if it’s just dead air it makes every scene feel awkward.
for 1), seems like you could do a proxy encryption solution.
edit: wrong way to phrase I think. What I mean to say is, have a message key to encrypt the body, but then rotate that when team membership changes, and "let them know" by updating a header that has the new message key encrypted using a key derived using each current member's public key.
The obvious error here is that an inner voice is not fundamental, and the fact that many people describe their consciousness in such different terms makes it much more likely that consciousness is just something that manifests in a variety of subjective experiences.
I’ve had some limited success attributing ideas to other people and asking it to help me assess the quality of the idea. Only limited success though. It’s still a fucking LLM.
Strong hashes aren’t so useful for you the individual with a high entropy per-site password… they’re useful for responsible organizations trying to proactively mitigate the impact of a future data breach on users with bad password habits (which is a lot of users).
If ClownCo gets hacked that’s bad. If ClownCo gets hacked and discloses millions of sets of credentials, it is now enabling a new wave of credential stuffing attacks.
I’m surprised to see a QBasic game with 1GHz CPU and 512MB RAM required! Is that because the game needs it, or because that’s what it takes to even run a modern OS with dosbox or something?
It's because it's not written in QBasic. It's written in a variant of QBasic called QB64 [1] - a spiritual successor to Microsoft's QBasic intended to run on modern 64-bit machines.
I went over the BAS source the last time this was posted a few weeks back and it has a lot of keywords that are specific to QB64 so unfortunately you can't run this on a true DOS machine (or DosBox).
The first time it barfed was because there was a space in the filename, and the QB64 editor didn't handle it. Running on the command line, with quotes around the name, was flawless.
I did give it a try, but no luck; qb64 seems to only run the code by compiling it via C++, and that failed on my system. (And I don't have the determination to try to find out why.)
The latter I assume. The game does load the text file into memory, so the old 640kb machines would probably struggle, but otherwise, it looks like it should run well enough on a 386 (or even a 286, where I wrote my first QBasic scripts, though they were nowhere nearly as polished)
At this point, I’m terrified some spacefaring AI is going to come over and relentlessly interface with whatever systems they can find while screaming “IF THIS BOT IS TROUBLING YOU PLEASE BLOCK ME AT THE PHYSICAL LEVEL” and self-replicating millions of clones.
It’s not hard for a lot of us to criticize who he became. He certainly had no shortage of criticism for others. I looked up to Scott a lot as a kid, and as an adult found him to be a man like any other, with limits and flaws… not merely in spite of his accomplishments, but often because of them. There’s a lesson there that I wish to carry too.
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