I think categorizing Tech Workers as a whole as being synonymous with this website's target audience isn't a correct assumption.
There's some social circles I frequent that are made up of folks that anyone here would qualify as a "Tech Worker" that - and I mean this without any exaggeration - abhor the community of commenters at HN. And I don't mean just folks outside of SV or other major tech hubs. There are people that very much believe the commenters here are the worst people in the industry.
And just to be clear, I'm not of that belief, but it's worth pointing out that the population of Tech Workers on HN isn't going to be indicative of Tech Workers as a whole.
Going back to the previous topic however; Those same people I'm referring to often have a complete overlap with those that are burned out by AI in any form (usage, discussion around it, being advertised to, being forced to use it).
And to some of their concerns, I genuinely empathize with them. That's probably best gone into via something like a blog post or anything else that lends itself to long form writing.
I worked at the main Kodak tower in Rochester for a few years in the early 2000s. Mainly as a paid IT intern of sorts to earn some additional money in college.
I often had to go to the basement there to store equipment, get equipment, etc.
The stuff I'd see down there was WILD. TONS of old movie/film paraphernalia in the form of posters, plaques with celluloid celebrating various movie releases, and tons of unmarked old film canisters. There was also a TON of old tech down there.
I used to joke that I felt like I was in that Hanger 51 warehouse from the end of Indiana Jones and The Ark of the Covenant.
It's a shame things went down as they did for Kodak. I really enjoyed those years I worked there. They used to make killer tuna melt paninis in their cafeteria area near the top of the tower and in the summer months I'd keep my car parked at work and just walk across the street to see the Rochester Red Wings play (AAA minor league baseball team).
Eh, it's a pretty big distinction weather-wise. Extreme Western New York and the Tug Hill plateau are all susceptible to somewhat frequent lake effect snow. Given the right time of year and wind fetch, you can see narrow convective / lake-effect snow bands from the Finger Lakes. But broadly speaking the actual annual expected snow and the phenomenology of the storm systems that produce that snow are very different over the rest of the state.
This makes me wonder if Carmack's feelings on NeXTSTEP had anything to do with the decision to release the first publicly available release of Quake 3 on OS X only at first.
At the time, I remember the ATI Rage128 chipset being the big deal and reason for why Q3's beta came out first on Mac... but gosh now I wonder if it was the feelings for NeXTSTEP.
Q3test came out in 1999 - on the classic Mac OS he despised, even a bit before its final OS 9 incarnation. This was to get the biggest bugs ironed out on the most restricted hardware scope available as they were going HW accelerated only during a bit of a wild west period when it comes to that.
We were all only reading about OSX in the press at the time - and when Q3 first made it to OSX proper, it was through a third-party (Omni Group).
JC did however switch to OSX as his primary development environment for some time when Apple was the first to ship the Geforce 3 in 2001, which was really the generation of hardware needed to do Doom 3 justice.
A year later, it was all about ATI's new flagship card which pushed things further for his needs - back to windows, and I can't rembember from his .plan files whether he moved back before getting access to that hardware.
There was a REALLY cool project by the design firm Berg in the UK about ~13 years ago. Cute little thermal printer with online services that allowed you to have scheduled printouts of things like weather reports, horoscopes, etc.
And... oh my goodness, I was looking for pictures of it and it turns out some kind person decided to put work in on having a way to do onprem services for it! [Check it out here](https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/)
> The team at Berg invested a lot of time developing the visual language and aesthetics of Little Printer, across the physical device and their web service.
Shame they didn't bother to invest any time in making sure their expensive devices wouldn't end up as paperweights. Seriously, it's infuriating that they were lauded for the creativity of this project but it's fallen to hobbyists and volunteers to engineer an entire suite of software to make this dead hardware work again, just because the initial developers were either too lazy, too shortsighted, or too restricted by bean-counters to develop open source (or at least self-hostable) software for these machines. You can't even change the server address of these things without hardware flashing and risking bricking your hub.
I know someone that this would be perfect for, but sadly too niche to have survived. It's a neat idea being able to get little "tickets" for various daily tasks for those that do better with those types of things compared to using a digital calendar
In the related world of task management at work, this reminds me of Walt Disney World’s “Cast Deployment System.” 20 years ago, it worked entirely on desktop PCs connected to standard thermal receipt printers. It would print and cut a little slip when you clocked in, showing you who to bump and where, and you’d hand the slip to them, because it also had printed where that person should go (their break timing, or to return to PC themselves). If they didn’t need you to assume a position just yet, it would give you a task to perform - e.g. “straighten plush in Store X until 9:08” or “sweep floor in Store Y until 9:10” - thus ensuring certain tasks got done on a regular basis without it being something a manager would have to constantly monitor. All of this was like science fiction to me in those days compared to anything else I’d witnessed in the entry-level service sector.
Note: no idea how it has evolved over the years but I’m sure “something something app” sums it up
Yeah we unfortunately are spoiled with mass manufacturing. If they'd been popular enough for them to make a million Berg printers, the price would have been more in line with what we expect.
The animations are fantastic and awesome job with the interactivity. I find myself having to explain latency to folks often in my work and being able to see the extreme difference in latencies for something like a HDD vs SSD makes it much easier to understand for some people.
Edit: And for real, fantastic work, this is awesome.
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