Some terminal software would use a function key that would be labelled "Execute". You'd usually have a template to put over the function keys to tell you what does what.
I remember the book saying something like "a person's name is the most beautiful sound in the world to them." The book may say to say their name back to them (I don't remember right now), but that's not what I took away from it. It reminded me of when people would make fun of my name (first and/or last) or bring up someone famous who has the same first ("Donald Duck") or last name ("are you related Joan Rivers?"), or someone famous who sounds like my first and last name put together (Doc Rivers), and I never thought it was funny. When I see people make fun of other people's names, the recipient never seemed to enjoy it either.
You’re for sure right about the name thing. It’s so hard to resist commenting on names for a lot of people, I think, due to the extreme asymmetry of novelty. When you meet someone named Michael Jackson, that’s such novel information to you: “there’s a guy right here in front of me who is named the same thing as a famous musician!” Meanwhile, from Michael’s perspective, they’ve been named Michael Jackson and getting comments and jokes about it near-daily for 35 years - and it’s really a boring non-story - they’re named after their grandfather, their parents didn’t care about the other Michael Jackson one way or the other, and they themselves also neither like or hate MJ.
This is like when you're working retail and the scanner glitches or the barcode isn't registered and the customer says "I guess that one's free then!" and you have to say "ha ha, very droll sir" as if you didn't hear that same joke yesterday.
I had a friend named Michael Jackson who went by a different first name. I didn't even know until several years later when he showed a group of us his drivers license and accidentally outed himself.
My full first name is Joshua, but when I was a kid everyone would just call me Josh. That was until 5th grade, when another Josh joined my class, and whose last name just happened to come right before mine in the roll call. I loathed that he "stole" my name and (in my head) made me sound like the repeat, so from that point on I decided that I would be Joshua because it sounded "fancier" to me. Years later, my choir teacher would sing that old "Joshua fought the battle of Jericho" song whenever he passed me in the hallways, which always made me laugh.
I've got a life long friend who's full first name is Josh, derived from the Japanese name Yosh. People often try to call him Joshua and it annoys the hell out of him.
> "I remember the book saying something like "a person's name is the most beautiful sound in the world to them.""
Nobody made fun of my name particularly, it's not like anyone famous, I just don't like it very much. I don't call myself by my name in my head, or on the internet. For most of my life my friends and coworkers had nicknames for me and I prefered that. I associate my name with official paperwork, formal situations, negative situations, aquaintances, and salespeople.
Perhaps because of this I have a bit of fixation on names (people, places, and products) and judging them to sound good or bad. Some names sound great or fine and it's no surprise to me if 'Robert' likes his name and likes hearing it. But I struggle to imagine that people called 'Helpless' or 'Abuse-not'[1] thinking those are the most beautiful sound in the world.
Yeah, you also have to remember that someone has heard every possible joke about their name and their appearance a million times.
I do think Dale Carnegie overemphasizes the importance of saying people's names, and in fact saying people's names in conversation often sounds forced and manipulative, but maybe that's just a cultural shift over the past century.
I've got the same last name as a sitcom character from the 1980s. I used to get so tired of people pointing that out. Luckily nobody really remembers the show anymore, let alone the character.
But, yeah, it usually sets off my spidey sense when somebody keeps using my first name in conversation. It's just seems weirdly unnecessary, so it makes me wonder why they're doing it.
I don’t have any problem with my name, and it feels manipulative and overfamiliar and I assume someone’s trying to Carnegie me into something if they use it.
> one by one I put each book back 20 minutes before it closed
If your library is like mine, it makes more sense to put it on a "to be shelved" cart, because they often track circulation even by the ones that didn't get checked out.
I've been going the library most weekends, and one thing I love about it is the random discovery of things that isn't driven by a personally-customized algorithm.
(I suppose I just contradicted myself a little bit. They'll keep the books that statistics show people are interested in, although I assume that is not the only criterion. But it's still not customized to me specifically.)
> I don't wanna read about [...] Marcus Aurelius!
One of the books I ran across and checked out was a graphic novel (book length comic book) about Marcus Aurelius.
> Apple’s gray on slightly-lighter-gray UI standards
It's a tangential point, but I turned on System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Increase Contrast (the on/off option, not Display Contrast) and now at least the windows are outlined sharply.
A lot of people who think of themselves as able-bodied never think to poke around in the Accessibility sections of their settings menus. But it turns out that accessibility options are for everyone; people should really think of and evaluate them as first class tools more often
Of course it is. What should a button on a screen look like, after all, it has absolutely nothing to do with a large mechanical button from the 80s the old designs tried to emulate. In fact, such buttons are becoming rare even in the physical world, the younger generation is more and more accustomed to touch buttons for operating all kinds of machinery around them. So "like a button" is very much an age thing
Nah, one of the things I found in Discord's accessibility settings is an ability to turn off or reduce animations and other visual effects by default, which is wonderful no matter your ability.
Possibly a factor, but I also think these issues are becoming much more widespread, leaving us less able to tolerate them than when they were less common.
These things are like a sidewalk having a ramp that was originally made for wheelchairs but then suddenly everyone uses it because it’s just a nicer experience with less chance of tripping and falling flat on your face.
Similarly, I still have my HP-42s but I usually use Free42[0] on my phone and tablet. They also have it for desktops. It's great if you like RPN calculators. Or if anyone wants to learn about them, you can use that program and follow along with the original manual(s)[1]. It's nice to be able to handle the order of operations without parentheses.
> Recently a Clojure documentary came out and the approach of Rich Hickey was seemingly the opposite: Deep research of prior art, papers, other languages over a long period of time.
That was also on my mind thanks to the documentary. Then I followed up with "Easy made Simple" and "Hammock Driven Development", and it makes me want to learn Clojure.
It's a really good language that is worth learning. If you like you can join the slack that is linked on clojure.org. Beginners are very welcome in my experience and there are a ton of great people around there.
He says brown is perceived when you see an orange-wavelength light that is significantly darker than its surroundings, providing the necessary context for your brain to interpret it as brown.
> I'm not smart enough to intuit NAND from transistors. I'm also not sure I will be alone in that. It's such a weird difficulty wall.
I agree with you, because I feel like I only got that one because I happened to get curious about CMOS (PMOS + NMOS) logic earlier this year, and remembered the general idea from before. Otherwise, I don't think I would have figured that out either. Google image search for CMOS NAND basically shows the solution, but the game doesn't tell you that's what it is until after you beat the level. I think seeing the answer, then immediate trying to reproduce it from memory is a good way to learn. Then if you try again the next day/week/month and are still able to remember it, then you've learned it.
I also looked up a solution for the full adder since I couldn't quite remember how it worked.
Tangentially, I've gone through similar material over time repeatedly in the games nandgame and Turing Complete, going through the Nand 2 Tetris course (on Coursera), building Ben Eater's breadboard 8-bit computer, reading "Code" by Charles Petzold and "The Pattern on the Stone" by Danny Hillis and "Digital Computer Electronics" by Malvino since that was what Ben Eater partly based his computer design on, and going over digital logic in CS-related EE courses up through how a CPU is made. But most of those barely cover anything below the logic gate level and I don't think any of them covered CMOS/NMOS/PMOS specifically which is why I got curious about them this year.
It's pretty fun though (my type of fun anyway), and I'm really curious to see how the rest of it goes since it's building a GPU instead of a CPU for a change.
They had the longest reaction shot of some people filming it with their phones (maybe they got a good shot) and when they switched back to after the booster separation I said at the time, “that would have been cool to see.”
Yeah it was horrible. Why are we here, to watch a video feed of other people watching it live through their phones?
We have 30 seconds maybe while this thing is in the local atmosphere, Jesus Christ just keep the camera on it and let us watch it launch.
I know this sounds like whining, and part of me is annoyed that I'm so annoyed at this. But it was just such an emotional moment, and it felt like the media team had no plan or any idea what to do.
Amazing seeing this here. I hung out with him a few times back then, and I was just thinking about this again just a few days ago. It was really great spending some time with such a smart person. He showed me how he would write little notes and mind maps in the margins of books, and the peg system of mnemonics. One of the times I was there, he was teaching python lessons to someone. I tried to make sense of his notebook system, and to this day I still use color coding, and things like a triangle for pieces of data in my notes. Somewhere, I have or had a copy of this with a lot of writing in the margins trying to make some linear sense of it.
Lately, I've been keeping an "engineering" notebook, using similar technique to the original poster's technique: dated entries and a place for a table of contents (that I need to update).
reply