jgoewert (u/jgoewert)

jgoewert commented on Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025) openculture.com/2025/09/t... · Posted by u/nobody9999

eafer · 3 days ago

I just found out that his story about the Heike Crabs is also complete baloney. That makes me sad, it was really such a great story.

jgoewert · 2 days ago

Really? I think Joel is the one full of it.

Human directed selection is a thing.

Have you ever seen a pug or do I need 58 articles with a bibliography 20 miles long to tell you they exist?

jgoewert commented on Devastated PC builder orders DDR5 RAM from Amazon receives DDR2 and some weights tomshardware.com/pc-compo... · Posted by u/teleforce

jgoewert · 2 months ago

This kind of crap is why I stopped buying from NewEgg years ago and don't buy anything expensive on Amazon anymore.

They got bought by that company that decided on quantity over quality and enshittified it by adding "market" sellers.

Order a Power supply. Realize it was from a market seller 2 minutes later. Attempt to cancel the purchase and get denied because "It has already shipped". Contact support to demand cancelling again, and they won't do it. Support the scammer instead. 6 Weeks later. Oh, the tracking number for the package got rerouted to some weird address in a city 500 miles away. Contact NewEgg and seller, because that is the NewEgg rule. Seller says "oopsie" and will fix. Wait 6 more weeks. Get a dropshipped charm bracelet in the mail. Tell NewEgg about it several times over that 3 months and even point to a post on reddit of over a dozen other customers caught up in this scam. Something NE They make me mail them the charm. 2 weeks later, finally get the refund.

Scammy companies helping scammy companies.

I don't buy anything that expensive on Amazon because of their support of things like this. I drive the hour and a half to Microcenter and even there, I pop open the boxes right in front of them at the service counter.

jgoewert commented on Government to shut down after midnight barring last minute breakthrough npr.org/2025/09/30/g-s1-9... · Posted by u/geox

centiar · 5 months ago

I avoid readig news due to the obvious bias that has seemingly infected all publications. However, tried Kagi News today and here is the summary of the shutdown:

"Republicans are pressing a clean stopgap bill to fund agencies through November 21, while Democrats insist on extending health-care subsidies and reversing recent Medicaid cuts in any deal."

https://kite.kagi.com/ecc8e0de-f9d3-421c-99cb-9b165e14e9c6/w...

jgoewert · 5 months ago

Dang. I guess kagi is about as useful as a cuecat with a synopsis like that.

jgoewert commented on Ultima VII: Revisited u7revisited.com/... · Posted by u/ibobev

hinkley · a year ago

Ultima VII ran in real mode and it wanted every single kilobyte of memory that it could steal away from DOS.

They had some fancy optimized version of HIMEM that worked a little bit better than the stock DOS one and people started using it on all of their boot disks not just the one for Ultima VII.

jgoewert · a year ago

This and Strike Commander are why I used a really weird serial port mouse driver I found on a BBS but used like 1/10th as much memory as the default mouse driver that came with the mouse.

But it got over the last hurdle of not having enough space.

Formatting config.sys and autoexec.bat was an artform.

jgoewert commented on Show HN: 3D printing giant things with a Python jigsaw generator calbryant.uk/blog/3d-prin... · Posted by u/naggie

jgoewert · a year ago

This came up at pretty much the perfect time for me to try out.

I started learning OpenSCAD over the weekend to try out an idea to 3d print a 70" dome to make my own Star Wars Battlepod after seeing that video on making the replica Space War cabinet.

One guy got an acrylic forming shop to make him one about 10 years ago for $700, but I was calculating in how much it would cost to 3d print and stich a dome screen together. My test sample that I started used a sort of ribbed dome that I was trying to figure out how to split the file and bolt it together - https://www.reddit.com/r/openscad/comments/1i922ed/trying_to...

I started playing around with thickness because at 1/2 inch, it was looking like about $200 in filament. But if I can reduce the thickness because of having the jigsaw edging to make it easier to align, it might get cheaper.

Currently tried running this in Windows and it isn't happy. I'll make a Linux VM and give it a go again.

>>WARNING: Too many unnamed arguments supplied in file in.scad, line 6 Geometries in cache: 20 Geometry cache size in bytes: 3802608 CGAL Polyhedrons in cache: 182 CGAL cache size in bytes: 0 Total rendering time: 0:00:01.063 Top level object is a 3D object (manifold): Status: NoError Genus: 1 Vertices: 39078 Facets: 78156 Num. beds: 0

jgoewert commented on Calm tech certification "rewards" less distracting tech spectrum.ieee.org/calm-te... · Posted by u/headalgorithm

DonHopkins · a year ago

I really miss the guy, and owe him so much.

David Rosenthal (one of the makers of NeWS) is married to Mark's widow Vicky, and he just emailed me that while cleaning out his office he ran across a couple of old VHS tapes labeled "Don's NeWS demos" that he's going to digitize for me! I hope they include a recording of Mark's SunView SDI game for which he implemented pie menus while snowed in at home with a Sun workstation during the January 22 1987 Blizzard of Discontent.

  From: mark@markssun.cs.umd.edu (Mark Weiser)
  Subject: pies in sunview
  Date: January 24, 1987 at 02:12:37 GMT+1
  To: don@mimsy.umd.edu

  I used the snow to hack pies into sunview.  It works now without walking menus.
  Will have walking over th weekend.
  -mark

https://boundarystones.weta.org/2014/11/13/1987-blizzard-dis...

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/c/mark-weiser/sdi/

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/c/mark-weiser/sdi/piemen...

I'd love to get this running again in a 68K Sun 3 emulator with SunOS 3.2!

Do we already know each other in real life, or should we begin? Say hi! Email is in my profile.

Here's another old email from Mark that I cherish, from just before he left UMD for PARC:

  From: mark@markssun.cs.umd.edu (Mark Weiser)
  Subject: paper
  Date: February 25, 1987 at 06:24:52 GMT+1
  To: don@gyre.umd.edu

  Leave it (a) on my sun keyboard, (b) in my second floor mailbox,
  (c) at the bottom of a pan of hash brownies.  I'll be sure
  to find it in any of those places.
  -mark

No wonder he was so calm! ;)

jgoewert · a year ago

When I was in college in '93 getting my BA is CS, my mother once told me: "You should email Cousin Mark. He does stuff with computers and I bet he has an email address."

I figured he was just any another software developer. Kind of an understatement, mom. Wish I still had those, but it was a school account all those decades ago.

I read the pie menu code and implemented it as a final project in Turbo PASCAL that year.

jgoewert commented on We Are in Need of Renaissance People victorhanson.com/we-are-i... · Posted by u/wyclif

jgoewert · a year ago

[flagged]

jgoewert commented on James Earl Jones, Actor Whose Voice Could Menace or Melt, Dies at 93 nytimes.com/2024/09/09/ar... · Posted by u/uptown

jgoewert · a year ago

I know people remember his voice for Vader.

But I think Thulsa Doom from Conan was a prime character he portrayed. Intimidating and soft. Scary, yet beguiling.

jgoewert commented on On Front Porch Forum, politics is fair game but unkindness is prohibited washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/eevilspock

jgoewert · 2 years ago

>> move slowly and moderate heavily

Yep. This is what is really needed for civil discussion. It is hard to work with otherwise as you get what my local small town FB feed normally is like. We are past the limit of peak assholery that only a system like that can even begin to filter things down.

For example: Tiny local news source posted about an accident on the highway on a FB feed yesterday afternoon. Top 3 FB comments were about one of the people involved in the accident and blaming them because of the color of their skin, so he probably caused it. Over 50% of the posts were racist and semi racist rants spewing everything ranging from 'he was most likely going to a drug deal' to 'this is why we shouldn't let them out of the nearby city'. 10% were normal 'oh, that is why it was messed up.' 5% were 'wtf, calm down racists' and those posts got major responses about 'get out of my small town if you don't like it'.

Seriously.

jgoewert commented on The AI Music Era Is Here. Not Everyone Is a Fan bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

jgoewert · 2 years ago

I am a fan. But not in the way it is mostly being used.

A lot of the songs that Suno generates are "good enough". I've been using it recently to do two things. First is to make a set of instrumental songs I call "Canoe Camping in Canada". Basically: Instrumental Americana Folk Accoustic. It is doing really good and generating ambient soundscape songs. I've spent about a week of free credits working and reworking parts of songs it generates.

The second is to make some 15 second showcard jingle music. I create short ads (15-30 seconds) for local companies and events that show at our independent one screen theater in-town before the movie starts. I just needs some audio to slap in while I show an image and some text about something. It works great for that too.

I was kind of curious about if what I was generating would be flagged as copyrighted, like if bits of the songs or melodies were directly out of something else. So, I upload them to Youtube to let their AI see if it can figure that out and haven't been flagged yet. I know that isn't a definitive answer, but to me it is "good enough".