What about if I say, "Please don't smash that like button" or "Smash that like button if you're an idiot"? Just wondering if it is based on transcript-grepping or does it even consider sentence semantics? (I know, overkill. Please don't implement that, YT engineers. You've heard of "boiling the ocean to make a cup of tea", right?)
If I were youtube I'd be concerned about the opposite. The whole point of youtube is you have all these different creators doing different things in different ways and youtube has stepped and said "No, don't do it your way, say our exact phrase and we'll help you". The downstream impact of that is Youtube's thumb on the scale is going to drive everyone to one particularly unconvincing phrase.
If I'm fiddling with the terminal or the font, I know it's because I'm procrastinating. I've trained myself to quickly recognize such side-quests and feel a quick punch of hormonal urgency, which helps me get back to work (with mintty and Consolas). You don't need the bells and whistles.
That's correct if it's always or very often your M.O., but if you rarely mess with it? How about if you spend some time fixing any annoyances that have accrued over time thanks to "involuntary unpaid vacation time"?
For example, I recently reduced my terminal startup time to 1/3 what it was by putting in some optimizations. I'll be able to benefit from that for basically forever.
... Ah, you develop on Windows? This tracks, then... All productivity, no aesthetics >..<
As an aside, I'm surprised how Apple fans think they're the one with the aesthetics advantage when their Lord and Master allowed them to change the color of their menu bar in...2023? :)
yeah man, I remember reading stuff like that before I was sold on it and eventually it got to me (probably after another borked Arch install) and I was like "fuck it, I am diving into this mess come hell or high water" and...
... Yep. It's exactly as s/he said it. Once you grok it, you literally want it on EVERY COMPUTER YOU OWN.
IMHO it still needs to get more user-friendly, or at least have another layer that is more user-friendly, as well as have ramp-up materials that are consolidated and good, before it will be more widely adopted
Love such articles where I learn something new. cdb is completely new to me. It's apparently the Microsoft Console Debugger. For others like me who were wondering how `eb win32u!NtUserSetLayeredWindowAttributes c3` neutered the window animation:
"By executing this command, you are effectively replacing the first byte of the `NtUserSetLayeredWindowAttributes` function with a `ret` instruction. This means that any call to `NtUserSetLayeredWindowAttributes` will immediately return without executing any of its original code. This can be used to bypass or disable the functionality of this function"
- eb[0] "enters bytes" into memory at the specified location;
- The RETN[1] instruction is encoded as C3 in x86 opcodes; and
- Debuggers will typically load ELF symbols so you can refer to memory locations with their names, i.e. function names refer to their jump target.
Putting those three together, we almost get the author's command. I'm not sure about the "win32u!NtUser" name prefix, though. Is it name-munging performed on the compiler side? Maybe some debugger syntax thrown in to select the dll source of the name?
The "win32u!" prefix is for the name of the DLL where the symbol lives. On Windows, the imported symbols are bound to their DLLs, instead of floating in the ether like they do on Linux where the dynamic loader just searches for them in whatever shared objects it has previously loaded.
I used to chase kites barefoot as a kid in India. I swear there was a time when I detected, while running with my eyes towards the sky, that I am stepping over a large piece of broken glass, like a fragment of a bottle of Coke, and I instinctively twisted my ankle so that instead of putting pressure on it, my foot and the bottle would just roll sideways. I just regained my posture, stepped hard to the side, unscathed, and continued running after the kite. There was not even a scratch on my foot. I still think about that incident. Maybe it was because I was so thin and lightweight that I managed to escape uninjured? What if it went horribly wrong and resulted in permanent nerve damage?
IMHO, a lot of these analyses suffer from survivorship bias; the ones who died don't get to tell you it was a bad idea.
I've always love WinAmp due to the simple reason that it is keyboard friendly. For example, the 5 buttons for Previous, Play, Pause, Stop, Next map to zxcvb. Simple and fun. Operations like searching for and queuing up files to play are lightning fast compared to Spotify, YT Music, et al. Also, I absolutely detest how YT Music keeps A/B testing ALL THE TIME, changing the location of things around. Ultimately, a website is never in your control.
As a home grown hacker from before the time of internet, I increasingly understand why people despise computers. I was always telling people, that you can make computers do your bidding, make them part of your life, frictionless. But I never needed IT help, I knew that whatever frustrations I might have are because of something I can work and fix with some digging around. But having things like Windows auto updates, websites ever changing makes even me feel the frustration and friction. It's no longer a wrench, it's a wireless corporate-run ad-powered e-wrench which needs printer ink for bolt-screwning.
if I remember correctly, Windows Updates were a pain in Windows 98 or even Windows XP. Maybe it was just a pain because I was on slow as molasses dial up but just the fact that active x(?) only worked on Microsoft Internet Explorer and it was required(?) for Windows Update, made me wonder why updating Windows requires a web browser.
I think Windows auto updates are a good thing. I just think people should have to opt IN to auto updates for different stuff differently and then opt IN to automatic reboots. An operating system should never auto reboot without at least a one time user consent. Any corporate computer I've ever used disables this automatic reboot when a user is logged in. I think this is proof that the setting should be like this.
Of course, over the long term, what we really need is to make more of updates not require a reboot, but that is a different conversation.
I just love how I am in a constant funnel trying to move me to a Microsoft account, and get to find new ad-funnel content on my task bar and get to figure out how to turn it off and hope it sticks more than a couple of days over and over again. And preventing playing this game requires disabling security updates and getting pwned.
Decades of experience and deep knowledge doesn’t keep me out of wrestling with the machine like this. What is it like for someone who devotes a lot less of their attention span and learning to computers?
For me, XP is what drove me to Linux full-time. (Later, a bit of Mac OS X on the desktop, when I could afford the hardware.) But I've always kept a toe in the Windows pie, the tool that, after MS-DOS, built my career.
Win11 makes me almost nostalgic for Win10. But Win10 is a sad crippled thing, it's just that you're allowed to prune it back hard. (Removing all Modern apps, for instance.) Do that to 11, it dies.
But using Win10 for a couple of hours a year is enough.
Recently a friend bemoaned being forced to move to Win10 because 7 wasn't getting updates and drivers, and apps were no longer working. So I tried a couple of fresh installs. It's so much better it's not funny; it's sad.
So I reached back and put XP64 on an old spare Core 2 Duo. It flies along. It's so snappy and responsive and so lightweight. It will run, not usefully but functionally, in 64MB of RAM. Pruned down hard it takes about 50MB. It doesn't fill a CD.
I am now idly considering trying Windows 2000 on my lowest-end functional laptop.
Not inherently, no. I haven't daily-driven Windows in years, either.
But that wasn't really what the post was about. It was about the smugness of trying to gotcha the parent with a caveat that hasn't been valid for a decade.
I was somehow reminded of this guy who once wowed me in an interview by coding up a small graphics demo rather quickly. Turns out later that that was the exact one program he could code without being hand-held EVERY SINGLE MOMENT. I laugh whenever I remember that incident (from early on in my career, in my defense).
You have to build a repertoire of questions that defeat rote memorization, prove real experience, and show genuine ability to solve unseen problems...
There's an interesting bit in "surely you're joking, mr Feynmann" where he is amazed how primary school kids are learning physics. Only, as it turns out, nearly noone in the entire country has any actual understanding of physics, because from elementary school upwards all they do is memorize the material.
I've had a lot of success asking about fuckups, worst thing they've had to debug, and general "fuzzy" questions that specifically do not have a single answer, or the answer is so relatable/specific to a person's experience. Then you have to watch them as they answer.
Once superintelligence takes over all jobs, as it is claimed will happen (, and there is an AIBI : AI Basic Income), I hope we are free to do more such projects :)
Nice article. Definitely need more kindness in this achievement society. One small crib, though:
> In Spanish, we have a saying, "Maestro Liendre: De tó sabe, pero de ná entiende." I don't really know (and don't want) to translate it because it loses its punch, but it fits perfectly here.
Wait, why mention it if I, the reader, cannot understand the saying or how it is even relevant to the article, but leave me with the tease that "but it fits perfectly here". Very puzzling, to say the least. Google Translate tells me "Master Niendre: He knows everything, but he understands nothing". Now I'm even more confused. That is so pithy and unambiguous that I really have to ask: what is it about the Spanish version that "loses its punch" when translated to English?!
Side note: I find ChatGPT to be a much better translator. It doesn’t just do literal translations. Here’s how it explained this phrase:
The saying "Maestro Liendre: De tó sabe, pero de ná entiende" generally means that someone appears to know a little bit about many things but doesn't have a deep understanding of any of them. It's used to describe someone who pretends to be knowledgeable but lacks true expertise.
TIL: Spanish has a sort of written contractions. I speak conversational Spanish so I’ve heard people talk this way, like Puerto Rico or Dominican Republic speakers shortening things, just hadn’t seen it written before.
tó = todo
ná = nada
https://www.spanishdict.com/guide/shortening-of-words
> There are a few apocopes of very common words that are pronounced and written in informal Spanish as monosyllabic words. These popular apocopes include
na, pa, and to, that stand for nada (nothing),
para (for), and todo (all). You may find these words written with an apostrophe at the end, but spelling experts advise against it.
Spanish version is much more compact and can be pronounced quicker so it can be used as pun.
This English version, you cannot just punch it, there has to be a pause like after "yet" or a comma before yet and then punch is delivered but still "understands nothing" is a mouthful compared to "pero de ná entiende" even though my Spanish is non existing, still feels like I could pronounce it much faster or much easier.
Funny, to me this English translation is very close in form and spirit to the Spanish one. I don’t know if I agree that “understands nothing” is comparatively a mouthful, considering that it’s 2 vs 4 words. But I do agree that the Spanish one packs a punch that is hard to get in translation. Part of that is the short words with strong accents, and a certain rhyming to the whole phrase.
I enjoy a lot the process of translating very idiomatic phrases, one way or another. I feel like I get to know both languages better.
I absolutely love how good the voices are in the VCTK-VIS dataset (109 of them!). I found it easy to install Coqui on WSL and it is able to use CUDA + the GPU quite effectively. p236 male and p237 female are my choices, but holy cow, 109 quality voices still blows my mind. Crazy how you had to pay for a good TTS just a year ago, but now, it's commoditized. Hope you find this useful:
CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES="0" python TTS/server/server.py --model_name tts_models/en/vctk/vits --use_cuda True
def play_sound(response):
#learning : you have to use a semaphore to serialize calls to winsound.PlaySound(), which freaks out with "Failed to play sound" if you try to play 2 clips at once
semaphore.acquire()
try:
winsound.PlaySound(response.content, winsound.SND_MEMORY | winsound.SND_NOSTOP)
finally:
# Always release the permit, even if PlaySound raises an exception
semaphore.release()
I love such stories. Thanks for sharing. I'd be super glad to read about your process, your note-taking techniques, etc if you ever write a blog post about it!
I should do that. Will post it to my twitter (in my profile) if I do.
Honestly i wrote as many notes as I could in a way that someone else could pick up and understand and the main thing I stuck to was never using a calculator until I absolutely had to, even if it was slower, so I could build a stronger foundation. I’m not sure I ever looked at the notes though.
And then I was just very disciplined about spending a few hours a day, every day, for a few months, drilling course by course, and didn’t skip anything in the knowledge map (at the time).
I still make time every weekend to learn something new or work on a challenging project for a couple hours a day while my little girls are napping.
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