Those were the Good Old Days of Computer Networking

[RE]

I remember when we got our first Ethernet setup in the common area on the ground floor of each of the dorms on the main campus at Columbia in 1977.  Prior to that the only network with printers attached you could send you word processor produced papers to for printing were up in the Computer Lab, brand new when I arrived in 1974 for my Freshman Year.  After my HS years working with a Brother electric typewriter which was a huge step up from the Royal manual typewriter I had in JHS, the Word Processor/Printer combo with the ability to correct your typos, change fonts, use bold and italics was like magic.  No more Whiteout, no more corrasable paper with smudges, no more carbon paper. It was amazing. 

Our dorm network had a primitive all-text messaging system, and the OP system did not yet have a Point-Click Graphical User Interface (GUI) and used the MS-DOS OP system Bill Gates made his initial fortune on before Windows, which was a direct ripoff of a XEROX GUI.  I had my very first email address, and our network was connected to other university networks via the Arpanet, before the World Wide Web.

It kept getting better through about the mid 1990s, when both Microsoft & Apple started going ballistic with Digital Copy Protection, and one by one all the free and open sources of information started getting locked up tighter than a 13 year old Catholic Virgin with a Kevlar Chastity Belt inside the Chapel of the NORAD command center underneath Cheyenne Mountain.  Rolling out around the same time was Google's all seeing, all knowing data collection and search cancer, metasticizing its tentacles through every aspect of people's lives, so marketers can know precisely how many squares of toilet paper you use every time you take a shit.

Once upon a time though, there was Computer Camelot.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ethernet-ieee-milestone

Ethernet is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

The technology has become the standard LAN worldwide

RE

[K-Dog]

The good old days.  ASCII text porn wasn't moving in 1977 ................................. but you were!



The days when the Doomstead was a vagabond at GLOBAL COLLAPSE waiting for cheap server space might not have allowed this.

Once upon a time in .

[RE]

The good old days.  ASCII text porn wasn't moving in 1977 ................................. but you were!

Yes, me and Fred Flinstone were moving in those days







RE

[RE]

Unfortunately, I have used up my last free article for the month from behind the New Yorker paywall, so I haven't read the article.  I figured it might interest K-Dog tho.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft

A Coder considers the waning days of the Craft

RE

[K-Dog]

Unfortunately, I have used up my last free article for the month from behind the New Yorker paywall, so I haven't read the article.  I figured it might interest K-Dog tho.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft

A Coder considers the waning days of the Craft

RE

Thank you it is a good article.

It is about coding and how GPT-4 can cough up code on demand.  The contention is that the programmer is as out of work as Ned Ludd.  Sort of because in the end the author writes:

Computing is not yet overcome. GPT-4 is impressive, but a layperson can't wield it the way a programmer can. I still feel secure in my profession. In fact, I feel somewhat more secure than before.

Besides agreeing with the author, it seems I can one-up the professionals.  I can get results from GPT-3 --- they apparently need GPT-4.

GPT-3 helps me code but only because I know what the fuck I am doing, and because I can tell it to fuck off any time I want.  I catch as many mistakes it makes, as it catches of mine.  Lately I catch more!  The time it takes to tell it to do something can take as long as doing it myself.  The biggest payoff is that A.I. has given me more confidence in my own abilities.

GPT-3 is an idiot savant.  Stupid, but with vast knowledge.  If you can ask the right question, hours of searching Stack Overflow are avoided.  Stack Overflow was the old way of finding what you needed to know when you got stuck and needed the secret sauce.  Stack Overflow is a network of programmers who ask and answer questions.  I have not contributed there much, but my reputation is really good.

A. I. is a road on which programmers may drive.  But if you have to go cross country, a coder has to hike alone because A.I. will faceplant on the first tree.

* This thing about programmers being put out of work?  Didn't B. Gates start flying coders in by the thousands about thirty years ago because there were no American coders to be had?

Yes, that bullshit flew and NOBODY cared. 

Consequently software employment is a bit of a rigged game as it is now.  So A.I. making a pig dirty?  I do not think so.  Many talented people have been unemployed in America for a very long time.  A.I. did not make that happen.  A.I did not screw them.

People made that happen.  People screwed them.

Swagath is 150 feet west of where I work in a warehouse doing my undercover proletarian investigative work.  I was investigating today.  It is one of at least 100 Indian Businesses within a mile of work.  I am NOT exaggerating. 

You are looking north.  I park next to the pet clinic.  And I do like curry.

I can code.  I can also throw a sixty pound box onto a shelf that is seven feet high.  Not a small feat for someone my age.  Proletarian undercover work is not without its rewards.

Thanks Bill.  My heart will flutter with gratitude when I throw the next box up on the shelf.  And thank you A.I. for showing me I really do have mojo.