Notices by Sean Heber (bigzaphod@mastodon.social), page 2

@montyhayter I did a tiny bit of early CAD stuff in a highschool class in the late 90s. There wasn’t any manufacturing though. Was a (presumably early) version of AutoCAD that ran on DOS machines so while there was some visualization, it wasn’t exactly… good. 😛

@montyhayter haha - yeah, it's amazing how much it's all changed! What's weird is how quickly we get used to those changes. I was watching some retro computer YouTube thing a few days ago and they had a program bouncing "balls" written in BASIC on a C64 or something. And it was like, they could only bounce maybe 6 of them and could double that if they used assembly language. (Or maybe more - I already forgot the details.) Now we can do thousands on a web canvas with javascript. 😛

@montyhayter that bouncing ball demo was legendary. I remember reading about it in magazines and stuff, even. I never had an Amiga. Was a long time before I ever got to see it in person, but even when I did finally it was still impressive at the time.

Then Wolfenstein 3D came out and suddenly everything else looked terrible by comparison and then Doom was dropped a year later, I think, and wow... What a fun time that era was. Stuff got exponentially better almost every year for like a decade.

I really appreciate that the long, illustrious internet tradition of shitposting is poisoning AI.

That said, I always worry about all the trees and stuff surrounding my house. Can't do much about that.

Me: *Goes to watch live news feed of life threatening weather*

News website: *watch this 30 second unskippable ad first*

It's surprisingly difficult to get live weather updates during several weather when you don't have cable/sat/antenna television.

Luckily some of the local TV stations will freely livestream during storms like this.

They're predicting 80-90mph winds. Apparently it has been destroying wind turbines in western Iowa for the last few hours. Not good.

I fully intend to do the midwestern thing of hiding in the basement for about 10 seconds and then going outside and watching until the pelting rain or hail starts leaving welts or there's a literal tornado in my yard.

As is the tradition.

Just found out, entirely by accident, that I'm under a tornado watch. I only discovered it because of a national news story I happened to notice most of the way down the page on CNN about an especially dangerous weather condition in the midwest.

And I'm like.. "Wait, I'm in the midwest!" I clicked the story.

Turns out, yeah, my county is in the watch area and there's a line of serious storms coming that have already spawned tornadoes and killed people today.

No trace of this in Apple Weather.

Cops learning about the new Windows feature that records everything you do on your PC:

My feelings about this feature are somewhere between horrified and appalled.

I admit that sometimes it might be useful, but I think at this point I'm willing to live without it because... :yikes:.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/microsofts-new-recall-feature-will-record-everything-you-do-on-your-pc/

It's an almost perfect encapsulation of how I've been feeling lately about Apple as a company - that they've very much lost touch with "real people" entirely. The people calling the shots are too rich and too spoiled and can't relate.

I'm sure it's easy to argue, "that's way overthinking it" except I didn't come up with this thought to write an article for a blog or whatever - this hit me *immediately* within the moment as I watched the ad. I was cringing before it was even finished. I think I even uttered, "ugh that's really bad optics, Apple" under my breath.

IMO, it's damming that no one in the (likely long) chain of people who had to approve the ad was willing to think different about it and go back to the drawing board.

I didn't like that Apple crushing ad, either. I cringed.

I understand the conceit of the ad - cramming all of this stuff/capability into a single magical iPad - but the execution was in poor taste, IMO.

All I saw was wastefulness. It's one thing to run with the idea that someone can replicate all of those things they probably don't have using just this one device they could buy right now, but it's quite another to imply that all of it needed to be destroyed for the iPad to pop into existence.

I always see people recommend Brother printers, but they seem to have a weird scummy looking subscription thing. Is that new? Or is it just that Brother doesn't require it and doesn't do DRM on the toner replacements?

Pretty dumb that the media keeps saying things like, "this is the trial of the century" when they know for a fact there are more trials coming for the guy.

Tonight's movie night movie will be, "Sneakers (1992)." My voice is my passport. Verify Me.

I was hesitant to start Foundation season 2 because while I didn't hate season 1, it was just... kinda slow and felt like somehow it could have had more substance or something. Now we're close to the end of season 2 and I'm kinda pissed because I want more episodes. 😛

Happy it got renewed for a 3rd season - it feels like there are a million little interesting threads they can keep tugging at.

@Gargron I was hoping that was the case and it was targeted at artwork and the like. Thanks for the clarification!