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 Now online (2)belb Monoid ...and 125 guests Last 5 registered Oplandisks nothingstar N_loop yipe foxtrotromeo Browse members... |
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my life chaos has resulted in baggage like: 2014, NAS hard drives failing, the only thing I have with enough capacity for everything is a 3U server blade with 8x SCSI drives for ~6TB of RAID 6 across 8 SCSI drives that, like, i have no idea if i could ever order replacements for. freaking ate at me. that stupid server in my parents' basement as i moved around a bunch. that stupid server in my storage locker, with 2/3 of my shit on it moving to a less-temporary situation. emptying out that fucking storage locker. carrying that server blade -- the heaviest thing i own aside from my car -- up two flights of stairs. three weeks of "i'm home from work, let's copy files for a few hours." finally, i have a total image. i still need to order more hard drives for parity, but now... at least, i can access it all across three USB drives without firing out that fucking power-sucking wind tunnel. tonight, just casually browsing around. old system backups. i pick the oldest one, and find older backups. same thing, again. soon i'm right at the dawn of time. my dad walked me through hello world in C when i was 9. the first ~actual~ program he walked me through was ASKP.C a 330 byte C program timestamped Dec. 30, 1993 that told you if the number entered was prime, or not. i was 9. the second program in the folder, by date, was BOUNCE.C, Jan 7 1994. dad explained the algebra behind programming a bouncing ball animation -- the essential pong ball physics, u noe -- but when it came to displaying the graphics, he said, "oh, uhh, hold on, i have to do something complicated." so i find this program literally 25 years later, and i think: "oh! i can go back and understand what i missed, now." first step: dad is using a proprietary API for a graphics board for the company he worked for to do the gfx, ok second step: dad is double-buffering. classic computer gfx technique third step: "Draw the ball using roughly lambertian shading" shit. now i have to learn what that is dad trolling me from the |
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grave |
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times |
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hah, that's great and (not knowing yr dad of course) i bet he'd get a kick out of it. bit ghosts passing nollij on. i have no data outside of the 32gb on this phone, i can't imagine having everything archived back into a previous millennium. it's almost freeing as well as sickening losing data though |
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shade some stuff, make it bounceĺ, reconnect with ancestral spirits |
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Cool story! Do you know what API he was using? Maybe you can fix it and swap it out for OpenGL or something? Might be something from SGI like irisgl if it was 1993. What sector did he work in? Also what do you use your servers for? Weaslepedia and that? |
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haa very nice |
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Lovely story. :) Made me think of . |
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he was in a sub-field of AI known as "machine vision," which is stuff like OCR, facial recognition -- getting a computer to "think" about images from a camera. i wish he'd lived to see the progression of self-driving cars, but at least he did get to see his one of the most exciting subsections of his pet field explode with life -- the discovery of "deep" neural networks: in high school, i remember hanging out at a startup he worked at centered around facial recognition, because they had broadband internet when i still had 56k. this was, like, 2000, though, before research turned a corner. the 'vision' was there, but the algorithms were not, the CPU power was not. from the early 00's throughout most of the 2010's, i've been incredibly dismissive of facial recognition technology, because i have firsthand knowledge of a startup struggling with it. but things have changed. CPU has skyrocketed. neural network algorithms have turned a theoretical corner. it's not practical yet, but give it another ten years, and your brit streetcams will be scanning your social media accounts as you walk down the street. it's a strange feeling. i love technology; AI. for most of my life, i've always been thrilled when breakthroughs are made. however, this was always from behind a safe veil of, "the really evil stuff is so difficult it's not worth worrying about"... but, now, i'm starting to get worried. it's not just the massive increase in computation power, it's the increased collection of nuanced data in googbook silos. you can't just build AI on CPU alone; you need data from the real world. and, increasingly, we're turning it all over. |
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for me to read now |
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two-factor auth would not be a thing for ages; the term then was 'biometrics.' like, retina scanners, finger print readers, and, yes, computer things that recognized faces. since their business was authenticating that yes, this is the actual person they're claiming to be, they diddled with numerous other tech as well. specifically, fingerprint readers. one day, after school, i was at the miros office. my father had an early-generation, 1999-era fingerprint scanner on his desk. i walked up across the office carpet; swiped my finger. zapped the ccd sensor with static electricity. later, my father complained: "you blew out a whole column of pixels! i had to rewrite the driver to ignore that column!" a month or five later, i'm back there. the fingerprint reader hardware company has sent a new model. it includes a grounding plate -- a rectangle of metal surrounding the sensor in such a way that more or less ensures you've grounded yourself before you come in at the ccd sensor, no matter what angle and speed you approach. i figure that accident happened numerous times all over, really.... but, i do like to think i'm personally responsible for that rectangle of metal around every laptop-mounted fingerprint reader. my thinkpad has one |
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tech has now moved to ultra-sonic, in-screen, whatever. ccd fingerprint readers are so earlier this decade. the whole arc is now obsolete. but it does amuse me |
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my first proper job was also a job dad swung me at another startup he worked at that was about creating realistic 3D like apple animoji, in 2002. deals were cut with high-end clients like coca-cola or something to have a plugin of a talking tiger that could answer questions. sketchy people that were ex-hollywood that ran the company kept suggesting CGI angles. this annoyed my father; i could tell. but he was having fun. creating ways to scan an actor's performance and map it onto a mesh of a tiger or an anime character. i, also, had a lot of fun. i'd been using livejournal, as was the thing then, but i'd begun diddling around with PHP. i decided to write my own blog software, as essentially a sort of first large-scale project, as opposed to just dicking around. compared to how i work with PHP now, it was fucking primitive. but, really, the whole internet was equally that fucking primitive back then. however -- in its place; its time, i do feel it was was perfection. one of my first proper works, so to speak, as a software developer. something that was real, non-trivial, thoughtfully designed, and all that. something i felt genuinely proud of. that attitude, and my father's help, leveraged me into a job doing a mix of IT support and PHP development at the avatar company. with the money i made o bought my first serious synth, a prophet vs |
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- post, edit delete forms management etc - comment system - ran into another guy with another blog on the but he seems to be stuck in park. |
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it was on the on the train after high school and he was was wearing a custom tshirt for his blog, space monkey mafia dot net. i'd read it here and there and i was like: is that your blog? i read it it and he was blown away, because, yes, it was just his own personal stupid web site, and some guy on the train flagged him down over it. it was a very nice moment. the internet was still very small. irc and icq reigned; facebook did not exist. very few sorts blogged. it was almost sort of a relegated thing like... i dunno. this guy in my high school d&d group was always reading these intensely obscure novels that were sort of rpg dnd storylines and i just tried to google it but i have utterly failed to dredge it up. that was blogging in 2001 |
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- oh, yes, it synced every post to livejournal too i actually still have a livejournal. i logged into it a year or two ago and a few people from all that time ago are still posting. it feels strange. perhaps i should wait for the right drifty moment; log back in and post something |
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sorry; deep in it now. i worry we won't even make it to a sentient AI. that, somewhere along the trajectory of somewhere towards a sentient AI, we get caught in a feedback loop of memes and the whole server forkbombs |
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the moment you link the day your father told you they were making pizzas with coffin wood in naples and that he keeps stressing you to become a pizza maker |
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i tried a day with pizza delivery when i was in that kind of place where belb is now, i left for the shit job and because i was told to not fuck with him for no reason by the arab owning the place. |
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the fucker told me he made 500 euros out of that, just what i need now to get my counts round |
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my father never was forceful about me continuing his passions. i just always felt this gentle tug, like he was quietly hoping i would come through and love programming and neural networks. i feel like he was satisfied with the results. no pressure was needed in the end, i probably gave him more grief than he did me. he'd get home from work, and i would be harassing him: i'm trying to program this, and it doesn't work, help? i built this synth circuit and it doesn't work, help? he had a masters in electrical engineering followed by a phd in neurophysiology because "what i really wanted to work with was computers, but computers were not good enough yet, and the brain was the closest thing to a computer." so he got his phd in brain studies, then promptly switched to programming as soon as the 70s were over. however, he taught me nothing about sports or women |
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dad jokes have such an emotional range. there is the corny dad joke, the joke about your dad as a joke, the in-dad joke, etc. |
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is he dead? |
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afraid so. i miss him very much. |
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particularly so because it was very much a two-way relationship. he would always sneak into my room and copy off my CDs. one day, he was rambling on -- he'd nicked venetian snares' album "winnipeg is a frozen shithole" from my CD library and ripped it, purely because he thought the title was hilarious. he was mostly into celtic music, folk music, eric clapton and all that -- but he absolutely loved winnipeg is a frozen shithole. meanwhile, he could answer most any question i could ask about physics, psychology, algorithms, and AI. since he's been gone, i have moments in both ranges: "damn it, i wish i could send this album to dad." but generally more "dammit, dad would know the answer to this." |
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fuck cancer. for real |
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as i get older, it's actually quite humbling; almost humiliating. my father was buddies with john chowning (inventor of FM synthesis) when he was at stanford for his PhD. he hung out a bit with the guy that invented LCD, but described him as "crazy, nuts" etc. i remember reading one of my favorite books for the first time, "hackers" by steven levy and he knew multiple names in the book across all three sections. but he was not in the book himself. he will be remembered as a massive amount of academic papers regarding machine vision, mostly, and as my personal hero forever. |
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sorry for your loss he sounds like an epic megadad |
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yeah sounds he was cool, also cos he is your background |
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thanks guys. i'm sorry for being so openly emotional. it's very un-bro of me there's a sequence that goes: his birthday, the anniversary of his death, father's day. my mom called me earlier last week just, "oh, i need some help, could you come over maybe?" and she was incredibly vague on what. i suspect she's just feeling it too. i'm going to give her a call after this and sort out when. right now, i feel like i need to start writing people he knew, while they, too, are still around. probably at least a few of them are capable of the depth of conversation he was. |
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> i suspect she's just feeling it too. well duh you big dumb lump go hug your mom. feels are very bro, they are top tier bro |
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i see you didnt stop doubting of your mum's need for help, just shut the fuck up and go |
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oh, I went. But it was more building shelves, moving boxes, and changing lightbulbs she couldn't reach. She was all up in arms because a mouse had gotten into the basement and this is just what taking care of a house involves. She is blaming the house instead, like if she'd picked a better house, she wouldn't have mice. I tried telling her any house would have this problem, that's just owning a house, but it did not seem to register |
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lol funny shit, makes you feel good just reading it |
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i think men on their 30s and still crying shit about their mums are pathetic, i just kicked one out of the place. i take it only if a parent has alzheimer |
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i can only assume you haven't had personal interaction with alzheimers. alzheimers got my grandma first. i only have one solid memory folder of her before alzheimers; she visited when i was like four and took me to the mall. but then the next folder is i'm visiting, and hi, uh, grandma? and someone asks, do you know who this is? i think my aunt "heidi" my grandmother replies. i am heidi; ok. "no, this is your grandson" someone explains. it's time for her to take her medicine. she was a personality, apparently, back in the day. in a childish echo of these descriptions, she promptly chucks the pill she's supposed to take into the glass of water brought along with it. a childish act of defiance a bit later, it comes up that we're going to get a dog, and what should we name it? "fleabag!" she tartly replies i never really knew the lady and so all this did not particularly effect me. however, my aunt, my mom's sister, has had alzheimers for a few years now, and it is properly ugly. i do not even want to talk about it, but a sample -- her husband does not want to deal with it, her children help a bit but not enough. she accuses people of stealing money from her after insisting they take the cash. shit like that. honestly, i've avoided asking for updates, because a) there's nothing i can really do, and b) it'll be ugly |
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cool story bro |
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