Venting thread

[Ares Land]

And yet again, some geek (well, actually, not 'some geek': a repeat offender) with no social at works fires off a stupid and impolite email. Do I make an effort to decode the intended meaning behind the rudeness, or just go nuclear and tear him the new asshole he deserves?

You know, I really, really understand why open source leaders and other IT people eventually degenerate into assholes. The pull of the dark side is, believe me, quite strong at times.

[Travis B.]

And yet again, some geek (well, actually, not 'some geek': a repeat offender) with no social at works fires off a stupid and impolite email. Do I make an effort to decode the intended meaning behind the rudeness, or just go nuclear and tear him the new asshole he deserves?

You know, I really, really understand why open source leaders and other IT people eventually degenerate into assholes. The pull of the dark side is, believe me, quite strong at times.

For all of those who haven't turned into assholes (Guido van Rossum) there are others that you are probably familiar with (Linus Torvalds, Theo de Raadt), and frankly, I think I understand why Linus Torvalds and Theo de Raadt are assholes...

[Travis B.]

I got the clock code in Forth working on all three of my ST boards. The only problem is that the version thereof for the STM32L476 did not use the PLL, so it could not clock the system at its maximum clock (80 MHz in theory, but for reasons limited to 72 MHz), but more importantly I could not use the random number generator (which I had already gotten working on the STM32F407 and STM32F746). So therefore I am trying to bring up the PLL, but it refuses to cooperate, hanging when it attempts to confirm that the PLL is ready. I don't know why it is doing this - all my PLL settings look kosher to me, yet it stubbornly refuses to work. And it is not like I have not successfully configured PLL's in the past as the two other boards I am supporting, the STM32F407 DISCOVERY and the STM32F746 DISCOVERY, also use the PLL. Of course, the STM32L476 is known for being more difficult to configure clockwise, even though it does not look like it ought to be that hard from looking at the reference manual.

[malloc]

Dropped a bunch of silicon wafers at work today and cost my workplace $12000. They decided not to fire me, but my reputation here is permanently ruined. Truly a kick in the face considering that work was the only place where anyone respected me at all.

[Ares Land]

Do you have, sometimes, those moments when you realize we have incredibly advanced technology at our fingertips, and that we basically waste it?

I had a meeting today; these can't be done in person these days of course.
So it had to be conducted via Zoom. So I log in to the meeting, and of course Zoom immediately crashes. Nothing to worry about. As it happens, I'm at work, I mean physically for the first time in months. My PC here doesn't have a microphone, and the microphone I'd gotten a few months back has gone AWOL. No worries. I'll use Zoom on my cell phone. I would like everyone to reflect for a second that the very ordinary, cheap cell phone I'm using has the computing power of a 90s supercomputer. You know, like the ones in Jurassic Park. This machine could plausibly sequence dinosaur DNA, but I'm using it so it can run complex video encoding algorithms and send gigabytes of data so that my coworkers can see my ugly mug, poorly lit and at an awkward angle. Also, like I said, the damn thing is cheap which means that while it could conceivably run a Mars mission, the mic is crap which means people catch about a word out of two. I have to bring the phone closer (which means all those teraflops of computing power are now crunching numbers on a close-up of my ear).
Alas, I forgot to charge it yesterday.
I'd checked Twitter (which also requires the computing power we used to associate with complex weather systems and downloads two Encyclopedias Britannicas every millisecond. It's exactly the same as Usenet and you could read the newsgroups comfortably on dial-up and a 486, just sayin') in the bus this morning, and this plus the Zoom call means the battery dies. I desperately fumble for the charger. Alas, plugging things to USB is a security risks. Wall plugs are out, they're a security risk too. No meeting for me.

I mean, twenty years ago, I could have attended this meeting by phone (either a comfortably plugged landline or a Nokia mobile phone that ran for two weeks on a single charge) giving no thoughts to the matter whatsoever.

(Afterthought: I found a way to plug my cell phone charger. This is a true wonder of technology, with decades of research behind it; you can run Doom on its microcontrollers; and yet the cable is too damn short. Guys, priorities.)

(Yeah, that's not really a vent: I just find it funny that we're using Skynet where a pocket calculator could do. In any case, the meeting was really boring so I was really glad to get an excuse to skip the end. Also, I know you cna join Zoom meetings by phone, but like I said, the meeting was boring.)

[quinterbeck]

Of all the Grammarly ads, the one I hate the most is the one where the narrator says "Grammarly helps you communicate smarter." Speaking descriptively, that may well be acceptable in some Englishes (it's not in mine), but it's surely not standard English or 'good style' for contexts where people want a grammar/style check??

Frustratingly, I can't think of a good fix for this bad sentence. For me, the adverb 'smartly' doesn't cover the meaning of 'smart' intended here. To fix, I'd have to say "Grammarly helps you communicate more intelligently", although there's a nuance of 'smart' that 'intelligent' doesn't capture, ugh. Even "Grammarly helps you communicate better" would be an improvement.

[Travis B.]

Of all the Grammarly ads, the one I hate the most is the one where the narrator says "Grammarly helps you communicate smarter." Speaking descriptively, that may well be acceptable in some Englishes (it's not in mine), but it's surely not standard English or 'good style' for contexts where people want a grammar/style check??

Frustratingly, I can't think of a good fix for this bad sentence. For me, the adverb 'smartly' doesn't cover the meaning of 'smart' intended here. To fix, I'd have to say "Grammarly helps you communicate more intelligently", although there's a nuance of 'smart' that 'intelligent' doesn't capture, ugh. Even "Grammarly helps you communicate better" would be an improvement.

I haven't seen that Grammarly ad, but that sentence does not quite work for me either for some reason. I would personally just go for "Grammarly helps you communicate better" myself.

[Linguoboy]

“Grammerly helps you communicate more cleverly.”

[Vijay]

This guy on Discord friended me and now rarely talks about anything other than veganism despite having happily boasted about how great beef was just a few months ago and showing off his non-vegetarian meals. I have managed to convince him before that Ataturk was genocidal and far worse than Saddam Hussein, but given how furiously I've already seen him arguing with anyone who questions his views on veganism, I'm not sure he'll still have the patience to hear me out if I try to convince him that people do eat meat for valid reasons.

EDIT: Oh, and he also made me a mod on his personal server.
EDIT2 (actually EDIT3 because "and far worse than Saddam Hussein" was EDIT1): Also also, he seems to be in a terrible mental state atm, and I feel like he's never been willing to open up to anyone about it. I know only he can ultimately help himself, but sometimes, we need help to do that, and I really think he's in that situation. I think he's doing a lot to hurt himself, and it's frustrating to be unable to help.

[Travis B.]

Since doing my 0.16.0 release of zeptoforth I have not been motivated to do much of anything. I did manage to code up something to test the random number generator, which uncovered a longstanding bug in zeptoforth which I did fix, resulting in a 0.16.1 release. Since that though, I haven't been able to bring myself to do any work on zeptoforth, despite the fact there are obvious things for me to do (e.g. get the external SDRAM and the framebuffer working on my STM32F746 DISCO board). The fact that when I did try to do an initial test on my new STM32H745 DISCO board it turned out that it was not compatible with my ST-Link tool did not help, as what I was planning on doing was to create an STM32H745 port of zeptoforth, but a lack of a working ST-LInk tool rules that out for the time being.

[Linguoboy]

I'm part of a couple Facebook groups for librarians. One of them has just shy of 45,000 members. Today someone posted a screenshot there of the infobox for Alexander the Great with the caption:

Wikipedia is great source of information.
323 Bc died and 356 born.

As you'd expect, there were a lot of "not sure if trolling or..." responses. Turns out, however, that the OP actually didn't understand how BC dates work. Some posters tried to excuse this by pointing out that he was from Pakistan, but I was like, "OMG would you make a post to a Pakistani group for librarians mocking an Urdu website for containing a basic error in chronology without double- and triple-checking it in at least three vetted sources?" I regularly put more thought, care, and research into a post for y'all than he did into one with which he spammed tens of thousands of his professional peers. It was entirely he own hubris and incompetence which caused him to show his ass like that and he should be dunked for it, hard.

(The saddest thing of all, though, was the number of USAmerican librarians posting, "TIL something!" Bad enough that we graduate anyone from university who doesn't understand the Western calendar era. That some of these people are able to go on and get jobs as librarians just makes me want to give up and find a rock to live on.)

[Raphael]

Now I wonder how various non-Western societies date events from times before the beginning of their respective standard year counts.

[Linguoboy]

Now I wonder how various non-Western societies date events from times before the beginning of their respective standard year counts.

As far as I know, the Hijri era works exactly the same way, but when I tried to confirm this in Wikipedia, I found that the Persian, Urdu, and Arabic Wikipediae all seem to prefer using BCE dates.

[Richard W]

Now I wonder how various non-Western societies date events from times before the beginning of their respective standard year counts.

Dating from the Creation solves most such problems.

[zompist]

Now I wonder how various non-Western societies date events from times before the beginning of their respective standard year counts.

Dating from the Creation solves most such problems.

Sure, but years like 13,800,000,000 are cumbersome.

[Moose-tache]

Can confirm Hijri calendar users switch to Gregorian when dealing with ancient dates. However, I think this has more to do with the fact that if they used Hijri they would have to look up what year that is since they don't line up with solar years.

[Ares Land]

Sure, but years like 13,800,000,000 are cumbersome.

Years are absurdly parochial. We should count in Planck time units. Neuralink will hopefully provide us soon with a neurimplant to handle these, adjusted for relativistic effects.

[Richard W]

Sure, but years like 13,800,000,000 are cumbersome.

Being correct is not always the best solution!

It seems the Burmese have a set of eras, starting around 700 years apart. They're way overdue for the next one.

[Starbeam]

I'm beginning to doubt nationalism is anything but an excuse to look down on people born improperly. Is there truly such a thing as good nationalism? Closest i can muster is preserving oppressed cultures from erasure/ violence.

[Ares Land]

I don't know. Myself, I think nations are an arbitrary and idiotic notion that never made any sense.