Fun and useful fact - if you ever buy a Sandisk SD card, there is a license key for RescuePRO Deluxe inside if you peel apart the two pieces of the cardboard that make the packaging! The software works for any type of drive and I have had great luck with it recovering some of my students projects.
A few years back I found a bug that would make deleted photos show up in the Photos app on iPhone simply by putting transparent PNGs into the photo library. I reported it to Apple via web, no response. I called their support and talked to a very nice guy who had an in-depth conversation with me about it and even watched a video I made showing the bug. He said he was taking the issue "up the chain." About 6 months and two .x.x releases later and the bug still existed. I reported it again, no response.
So I emailed AppleInsider who did a short article about it and within two weeks another .x.x release came out and the bug was fixed.
Sadly I think this is one of the only ways to get big tech companies to take action these days. Cant tell you how many times I have read about Comcast, Verizon, etc screwing someone over and being unreasonable about it until theres an article on ArsTechnica or some similar site about it.
These companies don't care about having reliable products, they care about the average consumer having the perception that their products are reliable.
Like you, I am just a hobbyist making beats in my room. No expectations of ever being a real musician. But when I'm jamming and I create a beat and synth line, start adding other instruments and really get a song going, there is a feeling that I get that an generated song will never ever ever be able to recreate for me. It's like a rush, an almost a euphoric tingling (and no I'm not on drugs) that happens that almost feels like a runners high. No output from a prompt-driven AI algorithm would ever do that to me. That's the value I see in making art for arts sake, for practicing a craft and for trying to just get better at something for the sake of getting better at it.
I was diagnosed with UC in my mid-30's, am in my early 40's now. I used to deal with flare-ups about twice a year that always coincided with allergy season (May and October/November). I was living in Colorado at the time and was drinking lots of heavy craft beer quite regularly. Three years ago, I cut out about 98% of alcohol from my life, and when I drank, I only drank clear things - hard seltzers and gin. But only once or twice a month at the most. I hadn't had a flare-up in that entire time, until this last holiday weekend when I drank whiskey and was hit with horrible UC symptoms immediately. As someone in the throes of a flare-up right now, I have to say that research like this is promising. But yeah, for me alcohol, primarily darker alcohol like whisky and red wine, are an absolute trigger for me.
I just want to say that this is incredibly impressive on so many levels. Your technical skills are obviously amazing but I really love how you were able to put this all together into an entertaining and well-produced video that anyone could understand. If you ever want to get paid 1/4 of what I'm sure you'll make as an engineer, you'd make a great teacher ;)
Thanks, was definitely hard to strike a balance between being understandable for non-nerds but also convey all the technical difficulties/achievements, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out .
Thank you for sharing this. I feel the exact same way. Work at a state university. Found out at a big town hall style meeting that I was hired during a "diversity cluster hire." I know I am talented but I was sitting there questioning myself. I am hispanic. Everyone speaking about the cluster hire was white. I appreciate the overall push towards awareness of this issue but I agree this felt like we were being paraded around. I skipped the "DEI Luncheon."
Oh man, this brings back memories! I worked helpdesk for a mid-sized company in SF these years. Things got so bad with our Dell machines that I would call my local Dell repair tech and he would answer the phone with "Ok how many bulging capacitors this time?". We probably replaced at least 100 motherboards for bad caps in such a short time. Reflecting on that, the amount of e-waste generated from this must have been staggering.
Jerry - if you're reading this, you probably single-handedly kept that place running ;)
That's funny because these days we call Dell all the time for bulging lithium ion batteries in their laptops. I think they don't understand the concept of not charging them to 110%.
Look for Levi's with 100% cotton (well really like 60/40 cotton/hemp), or 99% cotton. These last far longer. All this stupid stretchy synthetic fabric wears out differently than natural fibers and then jeans start to fall apart. The all natural ones feel more stiff at first, but they break in and are super comfortable.
I just shopped at the Levi's store at the mall in San Jose, and the jeans I mentioned were hidden on bottom shelves under all of the horrible synthetic crap. The good stuff is there, you just have to look for it.
> Look for Levi's with 100% cotton (well really like 60/40 cotton/hemp), or 99% cotton. These last far longer.
This. I get only the natural, non-stretch fabrics (Leviticus 19:19, FTW!) and mine typically last up to a decade or more with decent care (turning them inside out before washing, washing only when visibly soiled, etc.).
Now granted, this is also a problem now that I’m losing weight, as they’re too loose to use without a strong belt, but too good of a condition to justify replacing.
> All this stupid stretchy synthetic fabric wears out differently than natural fibers and then jeans start to fall apart.
For what it's worth, I wear mostly pretty cheap American Eagle jeans with stretch and they have lasted years on me. And that's despite basically wearing only four pairs of them in heavy rotation.
A big part of it is that I don't wash them every time I wear them. If I don't do anything to get them actively dirty or sweaty, I'll wear them a few times before they go in the wash. My understanding is that washing machines are, by a very large margin, the largest source of wear in clothing.
I have got those before, no wash levis 501, they last me about 2 years of (very) regular wear before they get a hole in the crotch area(in addition to other areas I don't care as much about) and are not really usable. I've had a pair of unbranded brand (14.5 oz selvedge) for about 4 years with not nearly the wear.
Back in the 70s there was actually a piece of malware running on the PDP systems of the time called "Cookie Monster" that actually would halt the user's session and display "GIVE ME A COOKIE"; the only way to clear it was to type "cookie". This only worked temporarily, however, and some versions of the program demanded cookies more and more frequently.
The Cookie Monster program was a part of hacker lore, including the Jargon File, at the time of the release of Hackers. I remember recognizing the reference when I saw the movie. Many of the other viruses and malwares in the movie ("Arf Arf Gotcha", the "Da Vinci Virus" being a reference to the Michelangelo virus scare of 1992) were also references to legendary real-world hacker lore. Even Zero Cool's crashing of 1507 systems in one day was a reference to Robert Morris's worm of the late 1980s.
