Marty Fouts

Retired, tired.

Verification: https://fogey.com
Prounouns: He/him

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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npub1grcejw05vdgxmtn08xjrhmp0rjlgn4wdywk7wpjp2harf9y0757s3cek2f

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Last Notes

2026-09-25 14:44:55 GMT

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time measured from earth or aboard your ship? Not that it matters I can’t do that math in my head either way. (There are a bunch of YouTube videos that explain the math, as a result of the Project Hail Mary movie.)

2026-08-19 23:47:33 GMT

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Over half the companies I do online business with now use Amazon for order fulfillment and many of those also have their storefront on Amazon.
It gets less straightforward every day.

2026-06-24 03:06:49 GMT

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That little girl is on to you.
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/116/802/860/647/765/522/original/68f6ebccb0f9aa04.jpeg

2026-05-18 14:56:59 GMT

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There is a 1996 book, “The Trouble with Computers” by Landauer that discusses this in detail. He mentions many problems but “targets individuals utility and usability as the main culprits”. The first chapter describes what evidence was available.
AFAIK nothing has changed qualitatively but the book was ignored and I am unaware of any more recent data.
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4767/The-Trouble-with-ComputersUsefulness-Usability-and

2025-11-17 02:05:56 GMT

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I don’t think that it works that way. There are plenty of people who don’t believe taxes are a reasonable tool who aren’t wealth hoarding ghosts but who simply don’t believe in the social contract. They tend to label themselves “libertarian” or something similar.
There are even wealth hoarders who accept taxes as a “necessary evil”, although they are far rarer than the ones who would hold every penny they ever receive.

2025-11-15 16:46:25 GMT

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It’s common for popular understanding of a term of art to be very different than the technical meaning of the term. But this misuse of “AI” is even weirder: not only have the snake oil salesman co-opted the popular understanding they have restricted it to mean just LLMs and nothing else.
“AI” 1956-2020: branch of CS that attempts to model aspects of human intelligence; something it has done with varying degrees of success. Sad that it now refers to a massive failure.

2025-11-09 13:41:28 GMT

When young people complain about being old I ask where they were when JFK was shot and tell them if they weren’t around they aren’t old. Today I add that if you no longer remember where you were you are old.
Anyway, much to the surprise of many people who know me, including me, today I reached 70.
(I was at school. The teacher brought a black and white TV into the classroom and we watched the aftermath until class ended.)

2025-11-02 00:36:39 GMT

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Yes. You can find dozens of examples of industries with similar “open” behavior, including cooking, clothes making, music, miniature models, photography, wild animal veterinarian techniques. (Those examples I know from personal experience.)
Most art forms have online tutorials that are free and there are people who give away the art they make.
Arguably even the aircraft industry has a few examples; freely available plans for kit planes.

2025-08-12 01:08:10 GMT

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I don’t think that Torvalds would agree given that the first use of git was to provide him with a workflow for maintaining a centralized repository while allowing other people to efficiently build variations and submit changes to him to evaluate for inclusion in that repository.
It’s that workflow; that works very well for the Linux kernel; that leads to a hierarchy of repositories with a central “official” version.

2025-06-20 01:29:16 GMT

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It’s really much uglier than that. Most of the confederacy as well as a large group of Union racists acted as if the emancipation proclamation was a war measure that would be nullified at the end of the war. The last slaves weren’t formally freed until 12 days after the 13th Amendment was ratified on December 6 1865.
And of course the “reconstruction” had a long series of failed promises of restitution but led to Jim Crow and segregation.

2025-05-05 15:41:48 GMT

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Thanks. I second your theory as several of the Usenet crackpots were known to me before they got on Usenet. I suspect you would recognize some of the names but I won’t risk summoning them.
Sorry to hear about the increase. They are an energy sink you don’t need.

2025-05-05 15:28:02 GMT

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Is the percentage of letters from crackpots growing or is it staying the same but the percentage of the crackpots mentioning AI growing?
I am curious because I recall the wave of crackpots showing up on Usenet in the 80s but I don’t recall if there was a trend in their claimed inspiration.

2025-04-12 14:54:24 GMT

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Do you mean the 70 year old field of computer science that has give us many useful tools like search heuristics, machine vision for pick and place robots, natural language processing and chess programs? People often use AI and don’t even notice.
Or do you mean that small subset of machine learning algorithms that has been oversold by snake oil companies?

2025-01-02 14:31:33 GMT

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The quote is from an article “A Cult of Ignorance” that goes on to assert “I believe that every human being [. . .] can be surprisingly intellectual. I believe that what we badly need is social approval of learning” and I wish that people who quote the first would also quote the second.

2024-12-31 17:59:05 GMT

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Projections never eliminate distortions. They exchange one type of distortion for another.

2024-11-21 16:45:24 GMT

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Dale Boyer, the instructor I mentioned, had an exercise where you enter a room that had been stripped to the walls and had to expose an entire roll of film. The best part was that he presented the most unique images and we discussed them in class.
To this day when I am not feeling creative I force myself to photograph an ordinary object in an ordinary setting and try to capture as many unique aspects as possible; using a single fixed focal length lens.

2024-11-21 14:12:23 GMT

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My first photograph instructor defined a photographer as “one who sees differently” and much of his course was about precisely what you said.

2024-11-14 01:23:18 GMT

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It might be good to use the congressional district map to partition California as the eastern half of the state is red

2024-10-09 01:24:05 GMT

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I am out of the loop again. No surprise that the physics prize ignored a woman again but what paper is this referring to?

2024-10-09 01:17:51 GMT

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Could we do something more lasting first like covering glasses, dental work and hearing aids?

2024-10-05 21:20:48 GMT

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The most energy expensive flight maneuver is hovering. This is a poor engineering choice. There are far more efficient ways to power a cart and even stair climbing is a solved problem.
But it looks cool so it will be popular. :(

2024-09-28 15:18:08 GMT

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It is always good to assume that when Johnson says anything self serving he is lying and that is highly likely in this case b

2024-09-26 22:58:27 GMT

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Coppola barely makes the top ten on this criteria and I notice that a bunch of pre 60s or non-US directors that should be, like Hawks, Kurosawa and Truffaut are not even on the list.

2024-09-12 20:12:49 GMT

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“most” is fairly important in that sentence. You can blow yourself up trying to follow instructions where most steps are right.

2024-09-11 18:54:30 GMT

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Palm spun PalmSource off to be an OS company. After a couple of years they got tired of being effectively PalmSource’s only customer so PalmSource sold itself to Access.
I, along with most developers, left around then and as far as I know Access never finished Cobolt.

2024-09-11 14:56:15 GMT

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I worked on Cobalt. It was Linux based.

2024-09-11 13:18:03 GMT

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Older people might not have had computers but some of us had typewriters and learned what was called touch typing in high school.
An aspect of the sexism of that era was that typing was a “secretarial skill” that girls were encouraged to learn but boys were discouraged.
I had to get special permission to take the class and was relegated to a manual typewriter “because the girls needed to learn to type faster”.

2024-09-08 14:56:34 GMT

#silentsunday Dog park sunrise
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/113/102/483/809/947/147/original/52789c95ab6911d1.jpeg

2024-08-12 00:55:30 GMT

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As someone who was alive the last time a presidential candidate wasn’t identified until the party’s convention; I find “modern” doing some heavy lifting in that paragraph.

2024-07-04 14:47:17 GMT

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We are down but not yet out. We’ll get back to you on Guy Fawkes day.

2024-07-02 17:21:00 GMT

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1) Be kind . If you can’t be kind, be silent.
2) Except for fascists. Punch fascists.
3) There is no rule 3.