Some 20 years ago I was out on my deck and I found this all metallic green fly that was smaller than normal flies. Even the head was green. Not quite the same, but similar to the picture.

I caught this fly inside a little plastic cup with a lid. I wanted to look at it up close. Then I saw a little tiny jumping spider a little bit bigger than the fly. I lifted the lid slightly and coaxed the jumping spider inside the cup as well. So now I had this little jumper hunting this cool green fly. I set it down and did something else.

Later I came back and the spider had the fly. He was having green fly snack. I left it alone again. When I came back I was absolutely astonished by what I saw. The metallic green fly was dead on the bottom of the cup. But it was now a metallic blue color! What?! Then I realized the loss of moisture probably caused the skin/shell to contract changing the wavelength being reflected to a blue color.

This made me wonder. How many entomologists have specimens what are labeled "green fly", but the specimens are blue?

Is this an early example of web devs (spiders) making CSS changes to nature?

I hate tech.

Trying to find a solution to problem in tech:
- 5 to 10 minutes searching for the correct terminology for the problem you are having.
- 5 to 10 minutes trying to find a solution.
- 5 to 10 minutes trying to find the correct terminology because the first terminology was wrong.
- 5 to 10 minutes finding the correct solution for your platform version.
- all the while dodging sketchy AI results
- Either you find a solution or you find it can't be fixed on your platform because X vendor is a POS.

So, this is not quite what happened today, but it pisses me off. I cannot imagine not being non-technical trying to use any platform this day and age.

I am trying to access data off of a backup. The data I want is in a user directory on a windows backup. I cannot get to user content because the user for the machine the backup came from is not known. I try with explorer and it says I need to elevate priv. So I do. It sits there and just spins icon doing nothing forever. The volume for viewing the backup is read only (actually a good idea, but annoying, can't change permissions).

So I remember that explorer artificially enforces permissions on folders. So I get Q-Dir which has worked in the past. So I get it installed and it fails to elevate privs. WTF! Everywhere I search I see no solution and shitty AI results. Then from the back of my mind I remember. Run Q-Dir as admin (which doesn't work on explorer due to artificial enforcement). So I do. It can access anything from the backup regardless of location.

WHY THE FUCK DO THESE BULLSHIT BARRIERS EXIST? It only causes frustration from users and locks people out of their data.

I hate technology.

So today I was trying to get a java program to run in Linux that needed a bat file to run in Windows. I was looking at the file and didn't know what it would take to do all the commands in Linux. So I said fuck it and had my chatgpt account do the conversion. It actually did it perfectly and replaced Windows specific commands with Linux equivalents. It reworked the data and set environment variables correctly. It also ran the java program.

Unfortunately I think the Java program had made assumptions about the environment and used hard coded Windows style paths. Rather than using some paths in a filesystem generic way. So it just excepted when trying to read files that were there, but had wrong slash in filename.

It was a good test though. I may have chatgpt take a whack at other scripts I don't want to take the time to look up syntax.

Going to be drawing patterns during a weld using a high powered laser. This pattern determine the shape of the laser point. Not sure on radius of laser output. Probably mm/um in size. Won't be able to "see" the pattern. Anyway, I suggested default pattern chains: 666, 420, 69. So far nobody really likes those options. Maybe I will do emojis.

I think I will need to optimize pattern distance between points. So I might get to do a real algorithm for this. I have not seen the requirements for this part yet. But I am thinking maybe A* for shortest path to next point. Or maybe some flood fill. Could be fun. It would be wild to use a gaming algo to melt metal. lol

So I uninstalled Xbox App off my computer like a week ago. Today I get a notification to check out XBox Game Pass. So I find in notifications it has separate app or thing installed to notify about shit like that. So I removed that.

I also don't like the pos Game Bar. It won't let you uninstall in apps. So I searched and found this command:
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.XboxGamingOverlay | Remove-AppxPackage

Good bye MS POS Gaming Overlay. Good bye Gayme Pass Notifs.

So I am on Pro version of Windows 11. Is this shit not able to be removed from Home version? What a garbage future we are in.

I am so naive about LLMs. I wanted to know if I can just make one trained on text I produce. I don't even know what that means. But I read that it can take a huge effort to train one.

The more I read about this subject the less I understand. I assume some are available commercially:
https://github.com/eugeneyan/...

But I don't even know what that means. If I wanted to make an LLM to handle text interactions with NPCs what are we talking about here? Is it a multi-gigabyte file? Do I have to worry about what it was trained on? I don't want one that has infinite knowledge. I don't want it to have any frankly. I want to provide its reality as the sole creator.

The problem is I don't even know what the question is to ask it properly. I assume I need something that teaches it english, but then what comes after that?

dude: Super Bowl!
chick: Can I have the soup in the bowl?

chick: <Jumping out of bathroom naked>
chick: Super Pussy!
dude: I will have the soup.

I have noticed that most of the mentally ill posts on here are from Javascript devs.

So this conversation went to HR territory really fast:

ITGuy: Do you have a cable I can borrow?
me: Maybe, why?
ITGuy: My brand new cable won't work on this printer.
me: <hands my super long cable to him>
ITGuy: Hey that worked!
me: I will test the other cable.
ITGuy: <leaves>
me: <finds no issues and works fine with my computer testing with a speed test>
me: <talking to other guy> I think maybe he didn't plug it in all the way. Sounds like a personal issue.
OtherGuy: Wait, what?
me: I think anything I say after this is going to sound bad.
OtherGuy: Yeah, I think so too.

Things I thought about later:
My super long cable worked, but the ITGuy's shorter cable didn't. Maybe he needs training for plugging in cables?

So I was able to learn something really neat about firefox. Apparently you can create a user.js file that will have all your about:config settings. I wanted to export my settings from my old profile, but could not. I exported all my bookmarks though. (Perhaps should have exported profile?)

If you go:
pancake -> Help -> More TroubleShooting Information -> Profile Folder: Open Folder you get a file manager pointing to your profile directory. Here you can create a user.js to house your settings. Such as:

user_pref("widget.non-native-theme.enabled", true);
user_pref("widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style", 3);
user_pref("widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override", 15);

This makes the scrollbar stay and I can control style and width.

Why does Windows for 30 years always start copying the files at the 40% mark of the list?

Say you have 100 files. Supposedly Windows will copy starting at 40 in the list and do 1 to 39 last. I didn't notice this. I talked to a guy online who said he has observed this from like Windows 95 to Windows 10. He is a programmer himself and has even asked Microsoft devs at conferences. Nobody had an answer.

If I had to guess it was some way to make copying appear faster when people could actually see files being copied one by one. Now, file copying is so fast you probably would not notice. So the same code has been used to copy files since the 90s if this is true.

I did find NTFS internally sorts by file name. While FAT does not. So my guess is the internal file system nodes are not the cause.

I have to wonder if gnu tools in Linux has similar quirks.

Heh, I look at a lot of posts this way. Complete disdain for other people's opinions:

Same phone, same pocket. If 5G is enabled it causes me pain in my leg. If I have it set to 4G it doesn't. I bought this phone because I wanted 5G speeds and my old phone was doing stupid shit. Now I have a newer phone I can only run in 4G.

I hate technology. I hate big tech companies. They can all eat shit. I think they do this on purpose.

No, I don't need your alternative theories or fucking gaslighting. Its not some bullshit cumulative trauma. I have been running it in my pocket for 2 months with zero pain. Fuck off. I am done placating people who know better than me. You fucking don't.

Woke up at 3am this morning and couldn't sleep. I am feeling very testy today. Not sure if I am going to need to puke later. My stomach is doing the "I might be sick" thing when flu is coming on. I hate that shit.

Oh, and Android keeps popping up random shit for features I don't use. I don't use Digital Assistant. I have that as turned off as I can. But today it popped up asking me if I want to use Gemini. No, I fucking don't you incompetent assholes. The only advice I can find is enable and then disable Gemini. But that causes you to agree to some bullshit AI terms. Just leave me the fuck alone assholes!

Woke up feeling like shit. 2 of my kids were puking their guts out. I had stuffy nose and didn't want to exist. So I slept until 1:30pm. Woke up to work on setting up my new computer. I have been working on it since Sunday.

I finally got my old computer backed up to an external 8GB drive. I use Aomei and I like it. I needed backup software for the new computer. I thought about getting Aomei pro again. I went looking through my emails from them and saw I can buy a license for 5 computers forever for like $50 or something. The retail is about $300 or something. The cost of 1 license on page with deals was like $70 forever. I say forever as they have yearly fee model I don't want. The others are a single price once forever. Free updates too. So anyway I get the 5 license thing. Now I have 2 licenses so I can outfit 6 computers. Nice deal. The $50 was better than their general sale price of like $90.

Anyway so I am working on the new computer finding all the shit I hate about Windows 11. I am confronted with a fucking default setting for every folder to sort by date grouping on the files. This is the single worse default I have ever seen in a file manager. So I figured out how to apply a default to all folders to turn grouping to None. Yeah. Then I go download stuff using Firefox and it is fucking grouping things by date in the Save dialogs! WTF is this shit?!

I search about Firefox and they said its a Windows default setting. I find I can right click in dialog to set grouping to None again. But I have to do this on every fucking directory! Fuck you windows. I finally break down I use this third party tool called WinSetView. I am kind of not wanting to have to use third party shit. But I have been staring at this POS problem for like 2 hours. Oh, yeah, even as admin I cannot change the registry key that would set the default to None. Fuck you windows.

So I use WinSetView and it works very fast. I check and it seems to have done the job. Time will tell on this. I cannot tell 100% because all my folders were tweaked every time I right clicked in the save dialog. I also learned these tweaks might be limited to 5000 total in the registry. What a shit show. At some point during this I submitted feedback to Microfsoft to fix this. We shouldn't be editing the registry to fix preferences.

Another issue I had was right clicking a file brings some shitty ass new dialog. It requires another click to be able to do thing like create a shortcut or scan a file with av. It also makes it so I have to either click again or hold down shift to unzip with 7z. I was already tired of this shit. I was going to try tweaking it with registry, but figured I would learn how to shift click. Best of both world? However WinSetView after I ran it fixed this shit show too! Happy surprise!

Friends don't let friends run Windows. But if you have to friends don't let friends run Windows 11 without WinSetView.

I am sure I will have things to complain about. Like firefox having a skinny scrollbar by default. Fuck you Firefox!

Been playing with Windows 11 for about 2 hours. I already hate it. Got a new computer and I can't downgrade to Windows 10 that I know of. The reason is all the drivers say Windows 11 on support site. No idea if they would work on Windows 10. Whatever, fuck.

First is some stupid widget thing (reminds me of security risk that was in Windows 7 desktop thingies) which don't work unless you have a fucking microsoft account. Fine, disabled that shit. I don't want a fucking microsoft account.

Next the menu is in the middle. Will try to figure out how to move that I guess.

Here is the first big fuck you by Microsoft. By default Device Encryption is turned on. But its not Bitlocker, that is somehow different. But I could turn on bitlocker too. Talk about a support nightmare. Bitlocker is some TPM supported encryption light? I read a Microsoft page describing the differences and I still don't understand it. So I turned that shit off. Supposedly it won't come back on by itself.

I also went in and did the standard disable auto updates via policy. Also turned off driver updates as part of auto updates.

Turned off a bunch of privacy shit too.

I don't know. Is having encryption worth it even for a laptop? I don't want to not be able to see my files if the OS goes to shit.

I hate setting up new computers because of all the bullshit you have to do. My older computer was fine until it started thermal shutdown shit for games I could play for years. So I have been dreading even using a new computer. I waited a full day before I even unboxed this thing. I am going to get the old computer serviced to fix the thermal shit. Then let kids use it for games and stuff.

I guess I am just tired of tech shit. It seems to get worse no matter what. I cannot imagine running as a Windows Home user. The shit I read about the fuckery going on there seems criminal. Like I heard of people getting their drives encrypted with ZERO ways to turn it off. Who thought that was a fucking good idea?

To be fair I feel like the default desktop styling is pleasant. The windows have a nice look and feel. The icons look nice. It will still open legacy setup dialogs. Not sure we will ever escape that. I am running Pro so I have a lot more options to unfuck things. I started with 64GB ram so I shouldn't have mem issues. I also had zero issues setting up with local account. Mostly because it autologged into machine with an account called User. This was the user they used to do the burn in. I created new account and changed password to User account. Didn't have to fuck around with install program trying to force Micro Account.

My first goal is to get my skyrim on there. See how it performs with a modded setup I have been running.

Lord Sheogorath has survived the Grey March. The voice actor almost died in the last few days. He has pulled through and is still alive.

Dammit Todd Howard! You are taking so long working on TES VI that one the best voice actors of the game almost died! Hurry the fuck up!

Anyway, I want to send cheese wheels to Wes to let him know I care.

Day 69 of "learning C#" or "this isn't C++":
Spent an hour maybe trying to figure out why I can't see Trace/Debug messages in the Debug output in WPF app. I have been doing a lot of testing in a Console app and Console.Writeline does what I need for testing and understanding how it works.

Today I am working a WPF app. I am using Trace/Debug.Writline and I get nada. Read up online and it "should" be working. I am compiling for Debug. I think, do I gotta actually run as Debug session to get output? Well, um, actually fucking yes. I know I can get console output if I want by changing app type/option or some shit. Its a group project so I don't want to mess with that for now.

Fuck you C#, WPF, visual studio! Whoever the fuck thought that was good default. I mean it probably is a good default performance wise. Fuck you anyway. lol

So I think I figured out something that may be a huge game changer in the gaming industry. TES VI has taken more than a decade to even be a thing. We got an announcement a few years ago about TES VI, but really nothing since. At that time they said TES VI would be in production after Starfield release. Another odd thing they said was that the technology needed to create TES VI was not quite ready yet. I am unsure as to when they said this last bit. I think before they mentioned Starfield release. What is this tech?

I think to understand what this tech is you have to go back to the roots of TES. One of their early games was called Daggerfall. I think this was TES II. The next one was TES III Morrowind. Then TES IV Oblivion. Finally TES V Skyrim. What has been happening on each release? The world of Daggerfall was huge, it was also generated content. That was the only way to go to that scale at that time. Then Morrowind came along and was big, but no where near Daggerfall big. Oblivion came along and decent size, but I think it was still smaller than Morrowind. I think similar with Skyrim. The worlds were getting more detailed, but due to shear manpower it became expensive to fill these large worlds.

I think you have probably figured out where I was going with this. What is the missing tech TES series wanted for large worlds? I think AI is the next big step for generating large worlds like this. From generating textures, terrain, models, cities, forests, etc. Obviously there will be procedural gen mixed in with this.

People keep wondering why TES VI is taking so long. I think Bethesda wanted to go big again on its worlds. But at the scale they wanted to do it would take way too much manpower to create all the assets for the game under any kind of budget. TES V has made them a shit ton of money. So maybe they have the wiggle room to do something truly groundbreaking with TES VI.

Anyway, that is my guess. They were waiting for the AI tools to be available to go big on their open worlds.

Okay, this just fucked with my brain. We are supposedly seeing organisms (including humans) doing better in radiation fields.

https://youtube.com/watch/...

Not so sure about the ending, but I am also messed in the head about some of the thinking going on with consciousness. I suspected our thought processes are not completely body bound. I guess if the mind is interacting with a separate entity then it would need a physical mechanism. I dunno, seemed really speculative.

This guy usually does a rug pull and shows how everything in the beginning has doubts. He didn't do this on this one.

If I've offended you with my posts I am sorry.
I honestly didn't think you could read.

Also, its FUCK YOU ALL FRIDAY!

Mind Blown...

So I was in a meeting with another dev talking to a customer. He instructed the customer to open a command prompt in Windows. Then to use the SSH command. In my mind I was assuming he had told the client to install SSH beforehand. Later I started thinking about it and did a search. Apparently Windows 10/11 have a version of OpenSSH installed by default. I had used Windows 7 in the past and always installed git shell to get this. So in my Windows 10 I did the same thing. git shell also supports aliases and other nice *nix like scripting features. So it is always a win.

So hear I am realizing SSH is installed by default on newer windows systems. Like damn, I never thought I would see the day. I think I still prefer git shell, but having SSH by default is nice to know. I know they got the subsystem shit to get Linux. But not everyone wants or needs that.

I probably should learn what is in Windows these days. lol. I mean, besides malware.

Found a meme about @retoor

This is to me the most amazing tattoo I have ever seen. This dude got a mini lemon on his head and he made lemonade with it.

My current computer is starting to overheat playing games that used to run fine. Like thermal shutdown I think on the GPU. So I need to have the thermal compound redone. Then I will be out a computer while this is being worked on. I would have a local shop do it, but would rather a vendor that sells thousands of computers do this.

I am thinking I might buy a newer computer and then send the current one in for repair. Then let my kids use this one when fixed. I just got this one where I wanted it disk and setup wise. I also would be stuck with Win 11 on the newer computer. Everything I do on my home computer is windows centric. The people I support, the stuff I run, everything. That is the biggest negative in getting a newer computer. I would rather buy one with windows 10. But they won't even sell that anymore.

The newer computer is much nicer though. 4070 over a 3060. Newer processor with 32 threads. Thinking of going 17" screen instead of 15". So I like the idea of the compile times being faster.

I am loathing the idea of setting all my programs back up again. This sounds like a nightmare. I don't even like thinking about it.

Fix the old reliable thing and/or get the new shiny toy. What bothers me is that it has only been since 2021. I don't remember having to redo heat sink compound on older computers. I keep reading this is a thing. Wtf is happening to the compound? Is it made to fail?

I have had tacos 2 days in a row now. They are so good from the Mexican roach coach I get them from. I have eaten at various restaurants in the area and the dang tacos from the roach coach are better than any of them. $2 a taco man! I don't care if its cat. There used to be cats that hung around their bus. Haven't seen them in a while though...

Doesn't taste like coffee...

I will not comply.

Just remembered this in a TES forum. So you get to remember or enjoy for yourself:
https://hezer.naraku.org/sekalaista...

I still attend JSA (javascript anonymous) meetings...

I asked my wife to make bacon wontons. Yes, they turned out very good. Would request again.