Two jobs after that, I got in a big argument with the CTO on a conference call in front of everybody my first month on the job, and they later tried to make me team lead when I was like 22 years old because I was the only one who could produce any useful (i.e. honest) information for them about what was actually going on with the project. I declined and quit instead to work at a startup with friends of mine. I was Peter Gibbons before Peter Gibbons was cool.
mozz
joined 2 years ago
Yeah. People already sell laptops; this is basically a super expensive laptop with a fancy screen and a janky custom OS. But having this as an app for your phone, that let you pop other apps up into the heads-up virtual display or have "full screen" access to certain functionality while still supporting all your regular stuff, would be pretty different. So it can make your phone "laptop like" any time you wanted to pop the glasses on, or pop little notifications into the corner of your vision, maybe with a couple of little buttons on the glasses for "expand notification" "clear notification" "clear all" "up" "down" "minimize" "maximize", something like that, would be super neat. And then any time you want to break out the keyboard you can use it like a computer.
(I know the permissions and app compatibility and battery life etc would make that not necessarily trivial to do)
I did this while driving to work once. Had time for a think on the way in, called up and quit, drove back home and went back to sleep.
“Our approach has driven customers away from American,” Isom admitted. “We’re unequivocally committed to getting those customers back.”
took responsibility for the corporate strategy misstep but insisted it was the right approach, despite its flaws. “We have driven some customers away. We have restricted customers from using our product. Those are the kinds of things we have to be attentive to,” he said.
“Now Robert Isom has taken full responsibility,” Tajer said. “He has come into the cockpit and said, ‘This is my airplane.’”
These people sound like aliens
TL;DW it's rare, there's no video apparently. They think they maybe do it to get away from predators but against all odds they can do a pretty good job at it for "short" distances.
Incorrect. That’s X11; we have that. Plan 9 is a little hard to explain quick, but I gave some examples already of stuff that is trivial with it that’s a big weird difficulty on other modern systems, but in addition to that the whole UI and the terminal / editor also work radically differently to how Unixlike systems do it.
The networking stuff probably won’t do you much good if you do not have other Plan 9 systems to talk to, but the GUI and window manager and editor, those also operate in this way that’s 100% different from anything else that exists. To me the networking and the way the file sharing works are probably the most interesting things, so IDK, you might be partly right.
I think this might be part of why it hasn’t caught on at all is that a lot of the stuff about it that works better only works better when talking with other Plan 9 systems, of which there aren’t really any.
Wozniak is one of the old school turbo nerds. Watch one of his interviews sometime; it's wild. Random things I remember:
- He had a super high quality color printer before they were popular, and he used it to make himself a fake ID that said "Department of Defiance" and used it to travel everywhere. He explained that it said his job was "Laser Operator" because he owned a laser pointer, and he operated it. His logic was that because it wasn't claiming to be anything in particular, it was perfectly legal, although I don't think that's actually how it works. He said he had to stop after 9/11.
- He requested from the US mint un-separated print sheets of $2 bills, and then would craft them into tear-off perforated sheets with an adhesive at one side. Like a stack of post-it notes. Then, to pay for stuff, he would separate however many sheets and then rip off whatever number was required and see whether people would accept it. Basically it was as far away from realistic-looking currency as he could get while still being 100% legal tender.
- He had -- and as far as I know still has -- the phone number 888-888-8888. It took him a decent amount of work to get it.
- Steve Jobs lied to some employees about whether they would get stock, and then took it back and gave them nothing. When Wozniak found out, he gave them everything they'd been promised out of his personal money (which, he wasn't short of, but still it's a pretty unusual thing to do).
- He started talking about having trouble making a change to his cell phone service and the interviewer got all surprised... like, aren't you a special person to them? Don't they make sure you're taking care of, since you are largely responsible for the little magic things they sell so many of? And he said, no. I talk to the call center just like you do. You would think they'd treat me different, but they don't.
He's type a type of individual that doesn't get made all that often. And, of course, he did almost all the engineering from the early-early-early days of Apple; there's a reason they got famous.
Plan 9
It is an absolutely revolutionary OS by some of the original creators of Unix, that extends its core concepts in more coherent and elegant ways into the world of modern computing, instead of having everything from networking on up be tacked on by people who were perfectly capable but lacked the vision.
Examples:
Instead of NAT, if one machine on your network has the internet and the others don’t, you can say “use that other machine’s network stack now” and boom everything works. Your machine knows what its real external IP address is, it can listen on world-facing ports on the other machine as it needs to, everything works and is simple.
There’s a command for “run the rest of this session’s commands on that other machine’s CPU / memory” and it all just works. The sensation is that your computer just got magically faster.
Etc etc. I actually haven’t played with it extensively, and deployment is so limited that I’m not sure how useful it would even be, but if you are a fan of well made OSs that do things in a genuinely different fashion, it is objectively the best option to play around with. sdf.org has a place you can get an account on their Plan 9 machines and they do little free beginner courses in it over livestream.
Yeah. The social contract used to be that the publisher would do marketing, editing, layout, and physical production, and the author would make the words, and they worked in partnership so they could both make a living.
Now, the author does marketing, editing, and makes the words, and bargain basement third parties do layout and physical production, and the publisher sits in their office chair screaming into their headset "MORE, MORE, I WANT MORE, IT'S NOT ENOUGH", thinking that if they can just shave the margins a little thinner and increase the already-bloated salaries they draw for doing literally nothing, then it'll finally fill the gaping chasm deep within them.
A lot of it, honestly, might be just coming from a society where everyone hasn’t been ground down into a weird consumerist nightmare of uncaring existence.
Once you’ve experienced health care or restaurants or factories or more or less anything, in a location where people you are interacting with treat one another like interesting valuable human beings worthy of respect and human interaction, even if there’s some money involved, it starts to seem really weird the American way where everything has to be on a system and no one gives a shit.
Not voluntarily maybe. But that’s not the only way. The only outcomes of any “realistic” course correction to the current state of the world and human behavior include widespread death and societal collapse once uncontrolled climate change takes hold for real, and at that point, it’ll go down quite a bit.