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dad joke
 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-01-30 03:04 [#02568093]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-01-30 03:04 [#02568094]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



grave


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-01-30 03:09 [#02568095]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



times


 

online belb from mmmmmmhhhhzzzz!!! on 2019-01-30 03:49 [#02568097]
Points: 6239 Status: Lurker



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


 

online belb from mmmmmmhhhhzzzz!!! on 2019-01-30 03:51 [#02568098]
Points: 6239 Status: Lurker



shade some stuff, make it bounceĺ, reconnect with ancestral
spirits


 

offline Indeksical from Phobiazero Damage Control (United Kingdom) on 2019-01-30 08:54 [#02568099]
Points: 10671 Status: Regular | Show recordbag



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?


 

offline mermaidman on 2019-01-30 09:55 [#02568100]
Points: 7992 Status: Regular



haa very nice


 

offline RussellDust on 2019-01-30 14:00 [#02568101]
Points: 15892 Status: Regular



Lovely story. :)

Made me think of this.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-13 03:13 [#02580064]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict | Followup to Indeksical: #02568099



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: LAZY_TITLE

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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-13 03:22 [#02580066]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



surreal for me to read now


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-13 03:33 [#02580067]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-13 03:41 [#02580068]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-13 03:55 [#02580070]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-13 04:10 [#02580071]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



- post, edit delete forms management etc
- comment system
- ran into another guy with another blog on the
internet but he seems to be stuck in park.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-13 04:16 [#02580072]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-13 04:58 [#02580073]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02580071



- 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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-13 05:18 [#02580074]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline mohamed from the turtle business on 2019-06-13 20:36 [#02580140]
Points: 31139 Status: Lurker | Show recordbag



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


 

offline mohamed from the turtle business on 2019-06-13 20:53 [#02580141]
Points: 31139 Status: Lurker | Show recordbag



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.


 

offline mohamed from the turtle business on 2019-06-13 20:57 [#02580142]
Points: 31139 Status: Lurker | Show recordbag



the fucker told me he made 500 euros out of that, just what
i need now to get my counts round


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-14 02:18 [#02580149]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-14 02:38 [#02580150]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



dad


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-14 02:46 [#02580151]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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.


 

offline mohamed from the turtle business on 2019-06-14 14:51 [#02580160]
Points: 31139 Status: Lurker | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02580149 | Show recordbag



is he dead?


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-15 02:49 [#02580195]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



afraid so. i miss him very much.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-15 02:54 [#02580196]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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."


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-15 03:19 [#02580197]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



fuck cancer. for real


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-15 03:42 [#02580198]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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.


 

offline Tony Danza from Fabulous Hollywood on 2019-06-15 04:21 [#02580200]
Points: 3420 Status: Regular



sorry for your loss he sounds like an epic megadad


 

offline mohamed from the turtle business on 2019-06-15 06:36 [#02580201]
Points: 31139 Status: Lurker | Show recordbag



yeah sounds he was cool, also cos he is your background


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-15 15:45 [#02580211]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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.


 

offline Tony Danza from Fabulous Hollywood on 2019-06-15 15:48 [#02580212]
Points: 3420 Status: Regular



> 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


 

offline mohamed from the turtle business on 2019-06-16 00:06 [#02580229]
Points: 31139 Status: Lurker | Show recordbag



i see you didnt stop doubting of your mum's need for help,
just shut the fuck up and go


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-16 01:04 [#02580235]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline mohamed from the turtle business on 2019-06-16 01:17 [#02580238]
Points: 31139 Status: Lurker | Show recordbag



lol funny shit, makes you feel good just reading it


 

offline mohamed from the turtle business on 2019-06-16 01:20 [#02580239]
Points: 31139 Status: Lurker | Show recordbag



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-06-16 04:28 [#02580244]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict | Followup to mohamed: #02580239



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


 

offline mohamed from the turtle business on 2019-06-16 09:40 [#02580253]
Points: 31139 Status: Lurker | Show recordbag



cool story bro


 


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