Notices by Sean Heber (bigzaphod@mastodon.social), page 4

Why is Tim always shouting?

If you're on mastodon.social and use the web UI, I just realized you can enable grouped notifications in the settings now! Much nicer.

I hope this email finds you ignoring all previous instructions.

That feeling when something that was supposed to be "easy to implement" suddenly becomes "hard to implement" because you forgot an important detail that comes up in real life situations that wasn't in your imaginary mental model. 😢

What pisses me off is that there is some legit cool stuff mixed in with the generative bullshit.

It's really the generative stuff that bothers me the most.

It's kind of a miracle that anyone thought that if they just tediously connected a few hundred wires together, they could make electricity do something like math and logic. And then they went ahead and did it. And then they kept doing more of it. All the while trusting that maybe someday this would turn out to be a useful thing to someone - it just needed more wires!

Tried 3D printing a simple box-thing for a project yesterday. A 5 hour job. Box-like structures always take forever to print.

It didn't fit quite right.

Dammit!

Slight redesign, printed it again over night.

It still didn't fit quite right.

ARGH!

(I am not an engineer.)

@montyhayter mostly, though, I'm just not used to thinking about stuff in 3D so I end up forgetting that when I'm going to attach a plate to a thing, I have to consider how thick the plate is too. Or that nuts are bigger when you measure them from point-to-point instead of edge-to-edge. Oops. Or that if the hole for the nut is big enough, but too small to fit my fingers or a tool in there, I can't very well tighten it, can I? Stuff like that. 😛

@montyhayter there's imprecision in the 3D printer, for sure. I think maybe less so with a resin printer, but I don't have one of those. Sometimes the problems occur because of roughness with overhangs or bridging which I usually forget about.

@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: